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Comment by litewulf | Hacker News Reader

One thought I had is that there really aren't enough different signs.

In most foreign countries, I've been able to recognize signs for bathrooms and such, and most place names I can memorize (even if I can't read the language I can still think "okay, I want to go to the one with the squiggly second character").

I actually think this has high "cool factor", but have difficulty really coming up with uses. I think restaurant menus (as mentioned by my sibling comment) is probably the only real use, and even then knowing the name of the dish doesn't guarantee an item I'm able to eat.

Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming. In some countries, buying a prepaid SIM requires lots of documentation which is difficult to do if wandering around doing tourist-y things, etc.

(Sorry, I do think the idea is cool, I'm just trying to come up with reasons why its not the neatest thing since sliced bread)

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> but have difficulty really coming up with uses

Uses would be more about being a tourist and getting a feel for where you are than mens/womens toilets - as you say, you can memorise those fairly quickly.

More like, standing in a subway, there's a poster, it says something about the train something ... wonder what? Walking past a big lake, there's a sign about some project that involves a pipe low down and a pipe further up, but what is it doing - taking thermal energy or using the water as coolant? Walking through the city streets, there's a plaque on the side of a building - something something 1872 something national? people? something something Joan 1st. Eh? What's on these fliers that are being handed out? What are the menu descriptions?

The easier it is to do, the more likely you are to do it - it's only important things that you would fish out a dictionary and start deciphering, this would be for everything and anything which attracts your interest.

Good point about the data roaming, though.

> Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming.

I think this is an important point, which is freqently forgotten. So many apps that would be useful in a foreign country are useless because they require internet access. When I went to Bulgaria last year I would have loved to have a translator app for my iphone, but every single one available required internet access, which there's no way I'm paying for at £3/MB!

If you are with a provider that is everywhere anyway, like Vodafone or T-mobile, the idea of roaming is very obviously just about gouging money. It's not as if T-mobile has to pay a third party by the Mb to ship data from Germany to the UK, they own all the infrastructure anyway!

All it needs is OCR and a cross-language dictionary built in. There's no need for data roaming to make this sort of thing.

True, but without a data connection you're limited to the client's processing power. With analysis on the server, you can use algorithms that require more code, more CPU, or more memory, as well as much larger datasets.

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