From Pixels to Prose: The Magic and Utility of Translating Pictures to Text

We have all been there. You are standing in front of a stunning menu in a bustling cafe in Tokyo, a historic street sign in Rome, or staring at a dense page of handwritten lecture notes, and you wish you could instantly pull the words right off the image.

Thanks to modern advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, you no longer have to type out foreign characters or manually transcribe pages. The technology known as picture-to-text translation (often combining Optical Character Recognition and neural machine translation) has transformed our devices into instant universal translators.