Translation & AI
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On my recent trip to Warsaw, Poland 🇵🇱 during one of the coldest months Ive been thinking of a solution to an obvious problem tourists may face.
With all the left hand driving and the signs in glory, my ignorance in Polish or the lack of it was clearly evident. Especially as tourist on a city break without tour guides and groups, having a language barrier was a blocker to say the least.
I of course did all the touristy things, like visiting the Uprising Museum, Warsaw Zoo, National Parks, the Independence Museum toured all coffee shops and ate too many almond croissants to number. But with all the history in Warsaw most of which was in Polish I do believe there is a need for a text translator. I was in countless places and text was not English ~ especially in places of History I could only enjoy the painting or photography with no content of what, when and how things happened. So I stared at Polish text attempting to break down or identify any English word or if was urgent I begin typing it into Google Translate app. Surely this happens to more travellers than just me?
At times being a solo traveller you don't privilege to ask natives to translate especially if you've not booked in a tour guide. And the expectation that everyone who isn't British is expected to speak English is somewhat insulting or uncomfortable for me.
A simple solution to this would be based on a machine learning tool. If a traveller took a picture of the native text, the AI can identify the language and translate it to your preferred language, in this case, Polish to English.
From a product perspective it is simple but to monetised it would pose a different obstacle. At its core its a translation tool a-lot like google translate or X. So from a B2B or B2C perspective a build similar to that monetised as a service makes sense. There are many SaaS based services that require Localisation on a global scale and do not have the infrastructure internally to build their own Localisation tool with translation strings features this is where we could fall in.
But to monopolise and become popular by travellers would be a free open service direct to customer. It’s unknown to me if the strategy of both B2C and B2B would work for this particular solution. But as an MVP it’s worth a try.