BhashaIf the text you need is on a sign, a form, a food packet, a screenshot or a page of a book, you do not have to type it out. Take a photo, upload it, and the text is read from the image and translated into any of 19 Indian languages.
How it works
Upload and translate
Open the translator, switch to the Upload tab and choose an image. The text is picked out of the picture using optical character recognition — the same technology that turns a scanned page into text you can select — and passed straight to the translator.
Your photo stays on your device
The text is read inside your browser, not on a server. Your photo is never uploaded anywhere; only the text taken from it is sent on to be translated.
Set the source language first
Before uploading, set the “From” box to the language written in the photo — not the language you want out of it. The text reader needs to know which alphabet to look for. A photo of Tamil text read as if it were English comes out as nonsense, and no translation can fix that afterwards.
Which scripts read accurately
Full support
These languages have their own dedicated text-reading data, so printed text in them is read accurately: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Urdu, Assamese, Nepali, Sanskrit, Sindhi.
Partial support
Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Dogri do not have dedicated data, so the reader borrows from the closest script. Kashmiri uses Urdu’s, as both are written in Perso-Arabic script; Konkani, Maithili and Dogri use Hindi’s, as all three are written in Devanagari. Ordinary printed text usually reads well, but letters unique to these languages can be misread — if accuracy matters, type the text instead.
Tips for a clean result
Fill the frame with the text
Get close enough that the text takes up most of the picture. The more pixels each letter has, the more accurately it is read. If the text only fills a corner of the photo, crop it first.
Hold the camera straight
Photographing text at an angle stretches and tilts the letters. Hold your phone flat and parallel to the page rather than leaning over it.
Avoid glare and shadows
Shiny signs and laminated menus reflect light that can wipe out whole letters. Move until the reflection is off the text, and make sure your own shadow is not falling across it.
Use printed text, not handwriting
The text reader is built for printed letters. Handwritten notes give poor results in every language, however good the photo is.
Questions
Can I upload a PDF or Word document?
Not at the moment — only image files such as JPG and PNG can be uploaded. If your text is in a PDF, take a screenshot of the page and upload that instead.
Is my photo uploaded to a server?
No. The text is read inside your own browser by a text-recognition engine that runs on your device, so the image never leaves it. Only the text taken from the photo is sent on for translation.
Why is the first photo slower than the rest?
The first time you use a language, the text reader downloads the data it needs for that script. After that it is kept in your browser, so later photos in the same language are much faster.
It misread my photo. What can I do?
Most reading errors come from the photo itself, so try again straight on, without shadows or glare. To fix individual words, switch to the Type tab — the extracted text is there, ready to edit, and the translation updates as you correct it.
Open the translator and choose the Upload tab to try it, or read how the whole tool works.