Whether it is a middle school student who wants to prepare for the beginning and college entrance examinations, or a college student who has to face four or six grades, or a prospective international student who is preparing for IELTS, English is always an inescapable subject. For English learning, the accumulation of vocabulary is particularly important.
Today, let's talk about whether the dictionary pen is good or not, whether it's worth buying.
Today we got the newly released Scantalker dictionary pen 3.0 to test it.
Scantalker Dictionary Pen 3.0, a mobile translation app and a paper dictionary comparison.
There are many tools available to translate and look up words. They can be traditional paper dictionaries, electronic dictionaries, or mobile phones. So is it worth spending money to buy a dictionary pen?In fact, whether it is worth or not is a very subjective question, and different people have different standards. Therefore, we can only tell you what is better about spending money to buy a dictionary pen, compared to various methods without money.
And to make it clear that the dictionary pen is good, we can split the word lookup and translation into different needs, and then talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods.
Translation speed
In other words, learning efficiently is to spend all your time on the blade. So of course the faster the word search, the better.
For traditional paper dictionaries, it is necessary to search one by one in alphabetical order. The mobile app and dictionary pen only need one to shoot or scan, which is obviously more convenient and faster.
Of course, there is no proof. We still did an experiment, using these three methods to look up the same word, which more intuitively reflects the gap between the two.
From our own test results, it takes 33 seconds to look up a word using a paper dictionary, 15 seconds to a mobile app, and 4 seconds to use a dictionary pen.
Conclusion: So in terms of speed, the dictionary pen ranks first, and the paper dictionary ranks last.
Word search experience
The experience of searching with paper dictionaries is very poor.
So what about using a mobile app? There is no doubt that the experience of searching on a mobile phone is obviously much more convenient than using a paper dictionary. But in fact, if you type manually, then you have to type word by word. And if you recognize by taking photos, you have to perform steps such as focusing and cropping to get the translation.
As for the use of the dictionary pen to scan words, it is really simple, and it is in line with the intuition. When the user needs to look up a word, as long as the dictionary pen is turned on, just aim the pen tip at the word and scan it, even without pressing a button. It's just like the correction tape and highlighter used in school days.
In addition, since the dictionary pen actually uses OCR to realize recognition, it is required from the perspective of use. But take Scantalker dictionary pen 3.0 as an example. It supports recognition at an angle of 60 to 90 degrees from the horizontal plane.
Don't underestimate the 30-degree movable range. In fact, it is not easy to achieve this through OCR recognition. In addition to the need for hardware support, the algorithm must be continuously optimized to ensure the accuracy of the recognition. And this range of angles actually covers the habitual angle of most people using pens, which also greatly reduces the learning cost of users.
Summary: Paper dictionaries are the most backward, mobile apps are relatively convenient, and dictionary pens are the simplest.
Recognition accuracy
For the part of recognition accuracy, paper dictionaries seem to have nothing to say. Because you can only check it word by word, there is no error.
But for mobile apps and dictionary pens, it's different, because both support whole sentence translation, so the recognition accuracy can still be discussed.
First of all, for the mobile app, if it is manually entered, there will be basically no problems. If you are using image recognition, the accuracy of plain text recognition is quite high, but if you encounter some articles with illustrations that cannot be removed by cropping, there may be recognition errors.
So for the dictionary pen, because it is scanned manually. So you can avoid all the illustrations in the text. In addition, because the pen tip itself comes with a fill light, it can accurately recognize the text even in a dark environment.And we also found a bright spot of dictionary pen whole sentence translation, which is the ability to scan and translate across multiple lines.
However, it is still doing well, that is, in addition to paper, it can accurately recognize text for materials such as cloth and bottle bodies. This is very practical for some classmates who are often grabbed by the elders at home and asked what the imported health products are and how to eat them.
In addition, we have also tested different font sizes and fonts, and the results show that the fonts and font sizes that basically appear in books, magazines, and books can be accurately identified, even some special handwritings, for this translation pen There is no pressure at all.
Summary: In this part, the mobile app and dictionary pen have their own advantages and disadvantages, but the overall experience is very good.
Translation accuracy
For a single vocabulary, whether it is a paper dictionary, a mobile app or a dictionary pen, the definition and part of speech can be displayed. However, due to the relatively small screen area of the dictionary pen, example sentences are not displayed. In addition, in terms of pronunciation, both the mobile app and the dictionary pen can provide American and British real-person pronunciations for users to learn, respectively. As for paper dictionaries, they can only rely on phonetic symbols.
As for the whole sentence translation, the translation ability is actually more demanding. The dictionary pen uses xuezhiyou's own neural network translation technology when translating the entire sentence. Simply put, it will be more natural when translating the whole sentence, and the semantic word order will be more accurate.
Of course, we also found some English proverbs for testing, such as:
Most of the results translated by mobile apps and dictionary pens can be close to Chinese idioms, and even a sentence like "Seeing is believing." can also lead to "seeing is believing" translation results.
Summary: In this part, the mobile app is actually the best performer, while the dictionary pen is inferior because of the lack of example sentences, but it is basically the same in the whole sentence translation. If you compare it to other translation technology without neural network as an auxiliary In the case of app, the dictionary pen will be better at translating long sentences.
Collection and export of new words
Why use the collection function as a separate evaluation dimension? Because for learning, especially language learning. When you find out what a new word means, maybe you only master 20% of it. And the remaining 80%, you need to continue to review, consolidate, and apply to be able to master. Therefore, whether the collection function is well done or not is a very important indicator to measure a piece of learning hardware or software.
For the collection of new words, it is obvious that it relies on manual excerpting into the new vocabulary book.
But now mobile apps and dictionary pens are quite convenient. After you look up a new word, you feel that you need to collect them, whether it is an app or a dictionary pen, you can collect them with one click. When you want to review, you can easily export the collection records, which is obviously more efficient than before.
Summary: The new technology is obviously more efficient than the old method, and it is no different between the mobile app and the dictionary pen.
The above is the result of testing different methods by breaking the translation into five requirements as different dimensions.