Windows Phone translates my world

I’m sure many folks who read the blog already know about the translate feature in Windows Phone 7.5 – though I’ve done enough demos of late to convince me to share this further.

I’m a big food lover and recently had some friends in town who speak Chinese so we decided to test our translation to see if we could translate an English menu in to Chinese.

  • I hit the search button
  • Selected the vision icon
  • Chose scan text.

A few moments later, I chose translate to Chinese simplified and showed my friends the results. They were impressed.

The reality is most menus are already translated so that’s not exactly where I see myself using this feature a lot – it makes for a good demo, but in airports, and cities around the world this feature will come in very handy for me as a way to translate the world around me.

I think it’s also a great example of where the breadth of Microsoft’s business is a strength – in this case with Bing in Windows Phone, and pretty soon you’ll see Bing in Xbox too.

If you have a Windows Phone, give Bing Vision Search a try – I think you’ll like it.