Talking Goggles - a camera with speech

After playing with this. I have to admit this is quite fun at the same time quite awesome. In some perspective I understand that some like TapTapSee better but I really think it works together quite well. The automatic feedback is just extraordinary and unique.What's New in Version 1.2Improved recognition of face images and landmarks. Music album covers added.

if you held a barrel against my head, i'd say camfind is the best, especially its ability to upload from photo library.
i would say the OCR feature of talking goggle is simply amazing. if you have not tried it, it should do yourself a favor and try it now. simply select video camera and hover over something with text on it.

i moved the camera around over a dvd, and it told me everything--title, year, stars, aspect ratio, everything.

first of all, screen curtain doesn't affect its operation.
it may be helpful to know that talking goggles will only tell you the name of an object when it knows exactly what it is; it will not give a description or a general name. for example, it will tell you something like "Benzara 58156 30 Minute Nautical Ship Sand Timer Metal Hour Glass" and not just "hour glass". for those items it cannot identify but have text on them, it will OCR and read the text. so if you take a picture of a necktie and it tells you nothing, don't get frustrated because this is not what the app is designed for.

other apps like Camfind will try to give you a description of the object, even though it can't really identify the object.

This is now back in the App Store after being removed whilst a bug was fixed:What's New in Version 1.5Resolved issues with recognition

I use TapTapSee as my primary object recognition software. It works pretty well for what it does, but could be faster recognizing images. Is this app faster than TapTapSee? Also, the video mode sounds interesting, since it may be hard for a blind person to know when a camera is focused. Is this like how Money Reader recognizes bills, where you move the camera over the object and it reads whatever it sees? That mode would be more convenient than having to focus the camera on something, take a picture, hope that I had it positioned right, and if I don't, repeat the process over again.

I just tried Talking Goggles. I was amazed to find it reading signs even though I was many feet away! I tried it on different computer screens and it would read content on them as well. What I really like about this app is the live video mode. With this you just turn it on, and point the iPhone at whatever you want to know about. You don't need to tap the screen once this is on. I was even able to use this to ID stores just by pointing it at the door. Pretty amazing!

What's New in Version 1.7Resolved recognition issuesImproved performance 

I just installed this hours ago and at the time of installation it was completely free. AppShopper still has the price set at $0.99 USD so I am guessing it just went free today. I can very well be wrong.

I have an Iphone 4 with IOS 4.3.5 on it. When I saw the favourable reviews, I decided to give Talking Goggles a go. I was very happy to discover that this app still runs on IOS 4.3. When searching for it in the appstore, I was surprised to see that two apps exist with the same name: one is free, but not from Sparkling Apps, the other is the app reviewed here. I don't know what is the difference, but I chose the very cheap app reviewed here.
I find Talking Goggles simply amazing for OCR, but it has never ever identified anything I showed it. I wonder e.g. why it has no idea about my Samsung microwave oven, TV and VCR. Perhaps because they are not exactly brand new, or perhaps the selection of recognised products is too "U.S. specific". But it was able to read every text on them, including their name printed on them.
I find it's not particularly choosy about lighting. It even read text when I shaded light with my hand (torchlight was off). When I showed the app to Sighted people, they told me that it even recognized text on various coloured backgrounds, even if the text was distorted or small. They told me it read text they had a hard time figuring out themselves. I find I have to put my phone no closer than 5 inches from the object, bigger distances don't seem to matter much. Once I was moving my phone in the air casually in video mode, and suddenly it read a name. I knew that I had a little box with that name printed on it, but I wondered where it saw the box. It turned out to be in an open drawer more than 2 feets away!
As I am Hungarian, I switched to Hungarian in the app, and I find that the app has no problem recognising Hungarian text, it even presents the special Hungarian accented letters correctly. And then came the biggest surprise. I didn't understand how on earth could the app read some pieces of texts from covers of vinyl records as it did. Then with sighted assistance it turned out that the app translated all English text it saw to Hungarian!!! I've never read about this "feature". It made me laugh much, but I'd do with a setting to turn translation off.
As speech is transmitted from Google TTS servers (beware of net traffic and additional battery drain), it frequently stops even on my very fast home wifi. The bigger problem that it doesn't resume. It often stops in the middle of a word without any continuation. So a lot of speech seems to be lost. This would need fixing. A native voice option would be very good for a lot of reasons. I tried to work it around: there's an item where the app displaysthe recognised text, it's after the "change language" in flicking order. I turn off speech in Goggles settings, then I focus the text item while in the app, and keep the focus there. In this case VO should read out as new text appears there. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. The accessibility of the app is a bit similar too, it's not 100 % reliable at least on IOS 4.3.5. Controls appear and disappear out of flicking order, and can't always be found by tapping. The "Take photo" button in still camera mode always seems to activate only when double-tapped for the second time. When changing languages, the language list presents itself with VO only after doing a lot of flicks and taps, that's also the case when you return to the main screen after a language change. The interface seems mostly accessible, but a bit non-standard.
I wonder how that "easy copy" or "direct search" work which the app developers state in the description. Anyway lack of easy copy seems no problem, this software is no alternative to a scanner. It can recognise only a small rectangle of text, and reading order is not convenient. But it's invaluable for e.g. deciding which document arrived with my mail to put into my flat-bed scanner and which not to.

I agree with most everyone else about the OCR, and its object recognition for me was decent. However, I'd like to point out that in Settings, under its entry, you can choose processing for fastest, balanced, or Best. If you are waving the camera around in video mode and have it set to Best it isn't going to speak very much. So set it to fastest when you are trying to locate where to focus, set to best when that's what you want.

Took it several times to Walmart and even on an iPOD touch without a flash, using the next-door Macdonald's Wi-Fi, it recognized many price-tags and items on shelves. With my iPHONE 5C it's even better, but patiently move the camera very slowly for best results.

I must be doing something wrong because it's very rare that Goggles says anything useful to me. I want to use the video mode to read displays on my stove, washing machine, digital recorder and so on. Some displays can be read pretty well, and by that i mean i can get 1 or 2 words out of 20 to 30 while others aren't read at all. I've more or less given up Goggles as an alternative for now and look for something else more reliable.
/Krister

I dono what about the other users? whether it is not working for everyone? or for few? If this is a bug for everyone, how to lodge a complaint? or how to inform the app developer? Just curious. I felt it was a wonderful app, while I was using it with my iPhone5S.

Raaj.

Dear all,

We have just released a major update for Talking Goggles. The photo mode has been improved a lot, it will now recognise almost anything or at least say something useful about it. Text recognition has improved a lot and handwritten texts are handled fine as well.

We haven't done this update for the video mode yet, since improved video processing would be costly for us and the price of the app doesn't allow that. We understand this is the more useful feature for the blind and low-vision community, and we will see if we can find a way to still offer this as well.

The speak out should now work flawless as well, but if you encounter any issues we would love to know.

Please let us know what you think, we can definitely make further adjustments, we really want to do all we can to provide a useful tool.

Have a wonderful day,
Martijn (Sparkling Apps)