Snapanda: interesting dictionary/camera app for Android

In my last post I looked at various free dictionaries available for Android, and Snapanda is an interesting addition to the list while adding a fun twist.

The app allows you to use your phone's camera to focus on a word - say on a menu, poster or any other text you have in front of you - and when you touch that word on the screen, it will recognise it and give you the option to look it up in the dictionary.

In the picture you can see I touched the word 'issue'. This took me a few goes admittedly. Sometimes it just recognises a letter or nothing at all and certain fonts or background colours seem to cause it problems, but it does work around 70-80% of the time and given that it's still in beta, that's not bad. The accuracy does also seem connected to how well focussed the camera is on the word and also the stillness of your hand when pressing on the word. My shaky middle-aged fingers might be the cause of some of the problems and maybe those of you with a steadier hand might fare better. 

The actual dictionary section is fairly rudimentary, but at the same time well laid out and easy to read. It's not too technical and they have some decent examples. 

You can also click through to find some expressions/idioms related to the word and there's the option to add the word to a personalised word list. 

As you can see from the screenshots, the developers have gone for a bright and breezy look, not quite sure what about dictionaries screams 'panda' but what the hell, why not try to make dictionaries a little less dull. 

Overall, I think it's a fun app, I would question whether it is actually faster than just typing a word into the dictionary and finding the meaning, but the 'aint this cool?' novelty factor might make English students use it more and learn words when they are on the street, in shops or restaurants. 

My perfect language learning mobile app

Over the last few months I've been searching around for language learning programs for mobile phones and found very few of any substance, which is odd really given that phones are perfect tools for language learning. There are plenty of dictionaries and thesauruses available, one or two phrasebook programs and a few gap-fill/exercise-type programs.

It feels a bit like computer language learning programs five or six years ago, when they were stuck simply replicating the kinds of exercises you can find in textbooks. Now, developers have really begun to work out how to exploit the multimedia and interactive qualities of computers to offer things that books can't. Something like English Central is a good example of how far online English language learning has come.

On a mobile phone developers really need to exploit the always-on, productive and mobile features of phones to allow people to organise their language learning. They need to take advantage of the phone's camera and the ability to be permanently connected to the internet.

What I would like to see is an app that could:

Take a picture of a menu/poster on the street and then offer an immediate translation. This would be like the app shown here

Be able to offer immediate defintitions from a variety of online dictionaries in the same way that dictionary.com does.

Be able to offer a variety of examples from corpora such as the British National Corpus. Also helpful to offer info about the frequency and usefulness of the words.

The ability to create your own list of vocabulary based on all of the above and to group them by topic or any other heading.

Basic things I think, but I haven't seen any app out there offering something like this. It would truly make ESL mobile for the learner.