Google Translate's ability to translate text from your camera in real-time is getting an array of improvements to make it much more useful. The Mountain View giant announced some updates that make the experience more broadly available and useful.
Perhaps the biggest news is that, while previously the feature could only be used to translate between English and another language, now you can translate from the supported input languages for real-time translation into any of the over 100 languages supported on Google Translate.
And if you needed support for more input languages, there's good news there too. The new update adds support for 60 more languages, bringing the total up to 88. What's more, automatic language detection now works with real-time camera translation, so you don't even need to know what language you're looking at anymore.
This update also brings neural machine translations for the first time to the camera translation experience. This makes results more accurate and natural, with Google saying results can be between 55% to 85% better in some languages. The capability works offline if you download language packs, but it can use an internet connection to give you better results.
Finally, the experience should also look a little better now, with less flickering when displaying the translated text. There are also three camera translation modes displayed at the bottom of the UI - "Instant" is for translating text in real time when the camera is pointed at it, "Scan" lets you take a picture first and then select the text to be translated, and "Import" lets you choose pictures already in your gallery to be translated.
