Instant Character Recognition Feature for iPhones

Pleco, a New York-based company who specialize in developing tools to learn Chinese, have announced a new iPhone feature that looks like it will be invaluable, not only for those learning Chinese characters, but for anyone who lives here and isn’t fluent in reading Chinese. The feature uses the iPhone camera to look at and “read” Chinese characters through an Optical Character Recognition system. There’s no need to take a photograph – you just point you camera and the app provides an instantaneous definition.

According to Pleco’s short demonstration video, you can also feed any characters read by the iPhone into a history list and create flashcards for future reference and learning.

The announcement on the Pleco site notes that the feature “works best on the iPhone 4, but it should also work on a 3GS if it's been upgraded to iOS 4.0; the cameras on the original iPhone and iPhone 3G lack autofocus, so unfortunately they can't take clear enough pictures of characters for our system to recognize them.”

The feature will hopefully be available in September.

So you no longer have to be left wondering what that notice taped to your apartment door means, or those banners strung on every corner extolling you to enthusiastically embrace the latest obsession of local authorities.

See here for an earlier list of useful China-related iPhone apps.