Google Translate is about to level-up with the acquisition of Word Lens

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Google Translate is about to level-up with the acquisition of Word Lens

Word Lens is one of the those “wow the face off your tech-illiterate friends” apps that allows you to use your smartphone’s camera to translate real-world text into the language of your choosing in real-time. Needless to say, it was real awesome and we were hyped to see the app recently make the transition onto Google Glass a few weeks back.

We’re not sure what took so long, but it Google’s attempt to scoop up every interesting technology in the world, Word Lens announced on their site that they’ve officially been acquired by Google. Developer Quest Visual says they’ll soon be incorporating their tech into Google Translate, hinting at a future update that will effectively level-up Google’s own service.

As a going away present, Quest Visual is offering up Word Lens for free on Google Play (and the Apple App Store) along with all their language packs. You can watch Word Lens’ debut trailer — uploaded to YouTube nearly 3 years ago — down below. We wont even lie, we thought it was a hoax the first time we saw it in action. How time flies.

Download on Google Play: Word Lens

[Word Lens]

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Instagram does users a solid by killing off activity sharing to Facebook

Today, the folks at Instagram have done their users a solid by killing off activity sharing to Facebook. Once a way to let your grandma on Facebook know how much of a pervert you were, turns out the handy feature was littering timelines with photos of fetishes and everything else your weird uncle likes on Instagram.

Although the changes were announced in the latest 5.0.11 update for iOS, we noticed the the usual prompt asking to share activity to Facebook didn’t appear on the Android version which was recently updated to 5.2.1 on May 11th. Previously, a popup with clever wording would appear just after signing into the app for the first time, asking if you’d like to share your “likes” to Facebook.

This new level of privacy is sure to be welcomed from all IG’ers and we found it an interesting move considering it further separates Instagram as a social network all of its own, away from big brother Facebook.

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