Curious if folks have any tools for reading physical books? I’ve been doing manual look ups and it’s incredibly slow going. I know I can just search for camera/screen reader/text extractors, but I was curious if anyone has experience with them and has warnings for some that are worse than others or if there are some that are head and shoulders above the rest.
Also, I don’t know how much vertical text narrows options, but my chosen material is like so:
AI.
It’s gotten extremely acessible. I’d take a photo with Gemini and ask it for whatever you want (translation, break down, meaning, transcription, etc). I’ve used it with Manga. It can tell what’s going on, know which character is saying what, and doesn’t care if the text is vertical or horizontal
As @gtluppi wrote, AI is one solution, I’m using it to analise my hand writing and it’s quite useful, so I don’t see any reason to not do it also for reading “normal” text.
For now, my personal choice is google lens (google translate in mobile with camera). I’m using it to read manga and it’s fast and quite ok. I can change camera image to “normal text” and it recognize kanji quite well. Also vertical and horizontal aligment wasn’t usually problem. But I’m not do any analise with it, just to practice patterns, vocabulary and kanji recognition, so convienience and quickness of tool is high priority.
