Did you think there wouldn’t be a good application for augmented reality anytime soon, save maybe for advertising and fun at tradeshows?

Think again, because teaming the iPhone with a great optical character recognition script has given us Word Lens, which is an instant translation app for the iPhone. Point its camera at anything reasonably readable, and it will translate the text and display it superimposed over the live video feed.

Yes, that’s right, live text translation of anything on screen. A language pack will cost you $4.99, but there isn’t much flexibility as of yet, with only English and Spanish available, and translation from one to the other.

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Now this is pretty fly for a white guy.  Until recent most iPhone translation apps were limited to text input or a phrase dictionary.  Select the phrase and an audio bite would play.  But what about speech-to-speech translations?  Well, it’s coming, albeit to the military.

Created by a company called Sakhr, their speech-to-speech translator iPhone app can translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English in real time.  The accuracy of the app, for lack of better words is remarkable and appears to have a very high accuracy rate, although I shouldn’t take the below video as a true testament since it isn’t real world testing.

As previously mentioned this app is intended for military use only, but it clearly demonstrates the power of the iPhone.  Too bad I didn’t have one of these in 9th grade French class.

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