Love this! Almost perfect OCR – Yomiwa Japanese Dictionary Review

My favorite Japanese dictionary app is Midori, but it lacks OCR. This app fills in the gap. I bought this specifically for the ability to look up printed kanji with my camera, but I was surprised by some other nice features. Kanji lookup includes handy stroke order animations. The ability to post a pic to the "wall" is a nice attempt at providing a community to get help with tricky readings. The App Store pics didn't show this, but you can set it to give you kana lookup instead of romaji which I was really happy about. The main feature, OCR, is great but would benefit from a little improvement in the speed/responsiveness of its performance. The freeze feature helps make up for this, but improving the algorithm would make it a 5-star app in my opinion. Look at Google's Translate app as a benchmark. Granted, that has Google's massive & well-funded team behind it and this app is just a couple devs. They've done a very good job considering their resources. The UI could also use a bit of improvement, particularly when it's sometimes hard to make out the red kanji characters when doing a live camera translate. But there is a separate window which clearly displays the characters, so this is a minor issue. Overall, a terrific app. I don't think there is another OCR app out there for Japanese students, so I was really grateful to find this. My days of laboriously hand-drawing kanji or looking up radicals are gone!
Review by peacetype on Yomiwa Japanese Dictionary.