The IRISPen Translator Executive pen scanner could be a real boon for anyone who quickly wants to translate and understand a foreign printed text. It is a niche product though, is far too cumbersome and slow to use for scanning large documents, and its limited functionality will be appreciated only by those with specific needs. Having said that, the text-to-speech function is excellent and it'll assist those who need to understand a foreign printed text. It's also good for inputting typed text into a spreadsheet, database or e-mail application without touching your keyboard. Business travellers can also use it to capture useful info on the road. The biggest criticism is that the error rate is initially very high until you put in a lot of practice to follow a perfectly straight line. Even so, you'll never match a flatbed scanner's OCR results.

Pros: Powered by USB port; translation and text-to-speech software
Cons: Poor documentation; time consuming and frustrating


Optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been around for half a century. Handheld scanners have been around almost as long. So what's the point of the I.R.I.S.' IRISPen Translator. Well, the USB 2.0 gadget actually has two unique features: it translates foreign printed text, and it talks! Just scan the lines you don't understand and they are automatically translated (using @promt Standard software) into a spreadsheet, text editor, database or an e-mail. That's not all - when you lift the pen from the page, the bundled OCR software reads back the resulting text in one of several pleasant digitised voices (yes, you can turn this function off!).

The IRISPen Translator is a snap to use too, and it works just like a highlighter. Simply slide the pen over printed text and figures and it is automatically retyped into a supported application and translated using the supplied @promt Standard software. There are six language pairs supplied, but you can only pick one during installation (you can actually scan text in any of 55 languages, including such specialised choices as Albanian and Irish Gaelic). The choices include English-French, English-Russian, English-German, English-Spanish, French-Spanish, and English-Portuguese.

The IRISPen Translator is available in two versions: Express (£84.99 ex. VAT) and Executive (reviewed here). Both offer the same scanning functionality, but the Executive version also recognises barcodes and handprinted numbers, a limitation of most OCR programs. It's also worth knowing from the outset that the IRISPen is an omnifont recognition system, so it can read virtually any font from 8 to 22 point. It also copes relatively well with italic texts, but can struggle with non-alphanumeric characters, such as those used frequently in French and German languages.

The device allows you to scan small graphics - such as company logos, signatures, mathematical formulae or handwritten notes - which can be added to work-in-progress documents. When it comes to tables, the lines that separate cells can be replaced by another symbol or cursor command. Scanning from within a spreadsheet, you can then jump to the next cell automatically.

Similar to other applications that rely on predictive techniques (e.g., speech recognition), you must practice with the scanner before it delivers results as advertised. For students or researchers who frequently need to capture relatively short chunks of text, the IRISPen Translator can reward this patience. For most other folks, it won't. For instance, the 'read and speak' functionality uses linguistic analysis to ensure that ambiguous cases are solved correctly.

You've also got to cater for the software. For instance, differentiating between a year and a number relies on the use of a comma. Take 1500 for example - scanned like this and it'll be read back as a year, and as a figure when there is a comma (1,500). Bank account number, time indicators, telephone numbers, dates, and currencies are all recognised in a range of formats. Bar codes of all common symbologies are also auto detected, and there's even a mixed reading mode where bar codes are read alongside other date, including normal text, figures and handprinted numbers.

The scanner itself is relatively compact and lightweight but although it's comfortable and well-balanced in the hand, feels low quality. At the one end of the unit is the 12mm scanner head and roller, while at the other end is a tethered USB cable. A neat touch is that the roller acts as an on-off switch when you make contact with or lift the pen from the page, so there's no need to press and hold a button. There are also guide marks on the top surface of the pen to help you drag the scanner in a straight line, in addition to two programmable buttons (there are actually three buttons, but confusingly one is not active). By default, the buttons are pre-programmed to work with the translation software.

I.R.I.S. claims the solution reaches up to 100 per cent accuracy when it retypes information, but this of course is optimistic. In our tests, the interpretation of punctuation marks, special symbols and abbreviations (such as Dr. And St.) were often pronounced incorrectly. We also encountered errors where the software calls upon its linguistic database to take into account grammatical rules. This, however, is only an issue when you translate documents.

While it scans and recognises relatively quickly at up to 80mm per second, you need to really concentrate on what you're doing so that you drag the scanner tip in a straight line at an even speed. As you can image, this quickly becomes frustrating with long documents. Thankfully, auditive feedback saves you from having to keep viewing your monitor to check the results after each line. Even so, scanned text almost always appears wavy and bowed - it's almost impossible to move your hand in as perfectly straight a line as a mechanical scanner.

BIOS, Jun 30, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Scanner