What is Waygo?
Waygo Visual Translator by Translate Abroad turns your iPhone into an instant translator for signage and menus in Chinese.
Utilizing a combo of both Optical Character Recognition and a translation piece, Waygo translates Chinese characters into English text by seeing images, finding the relevant text, and finally creating sensible phrases. Waygo does not require an internet connection to operate. Companies that enter the field of OCR spend many years getting their solution to work, let alone be any good. We are no different. Our team has been working on our in-house, proprietary algorithms for about two years and it has paid off. When benchmarked against ABBYY (the top commercial OCR) our software is five times faster, two times more accurate, and a tenth of the file size.
Waygo’s Roots
The idea for Waygo came about two years ago as Ryan was working in China building mobile games. He was in the process of learning Chinese and found it extremely difficult, especially for someone used to romance languages. If only there were a tool that he could look up characters by simply pointing a phone camera at the text, his–and many others–lives would become much easier. At first the idea was an educational tool, but eventually it grew in Ryan’s head that this could help any traveler in any country see with new eyes. We decided to first focus on China and the East Asian market because that’s where our team had the most experience and it was also the most difficult batch of languages to solve and we were up for the challenge! Our roots have provided a solid foundation and we are excited for what we have in the works–improvements and future app versions.
Why The Name Waygo?
Waygo helps travelers go to a foreign country, or 外国 (“wài guó”) in Chinese. After discovering Americans have difficulty pronouncing Chinese, we adapted the pinyin to the English language.