Hacker News Reader

Comment by gchokov | Hacker News Reader

Sundar did nothing but failed projects. Google is still where it was many years ago.

My Google phone can instantly translate almost any foreign language, embedded in an image, without an internet connection. Pretty sure that was not a thing 8 years ago.

If/when Google embeds an (local and/or lightweight) Bard model into every Pixel phone, that will be a game-changer.

That was a feature of google translate many years ago. Absolutely nothing new.

And was came from a purchase of Word Lens not something in house if I remember right.

While cool, that's a feature, not a product. Sundar has not led the company on any new products that have succeeded. The chat apps failed, Meet/Hangouts/whatever lost to Zoom, Stadia got cancelled, etc. All their current cash cows made their names before him.

At least he didn't oversee the introduction of Google Plus, though.

He’s leading Google Cloud to strong growth, which is more important than something niche but innovative like Stadia.

Technically they poached Thomas Kurian from Oracle for that.....

That's fine, Kurian is under Sundar too. But GCP isn't winning.

That's WordLens, which Google acquired in 2014, 9 years ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/google-has-acquired-quest-...

Do you have a source that WordLens worked without an internet connection?

If it didn't, surely that wasn't a tech limitation? Google Translator itself has had offline translation capabilities for many years now, and Bing had that feature even longer. Offline OCR has been around even longer.

Yes, offline capability was there since day one.

The Android version of Word Lens actually launched last month [June 2012]. All of the features that made the iOS app interesting are available in the Android version, including completely offline translations.

https://lifehacker.com/word-lens-for-android-brings-offline-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com