Photocopiers suck. They’re always breaking, needing new toner, or just a pain to figure out how to use – I never thought I’d be writing about them, let alone blown away by one.
Xerox, however, has done something interesting: its photocopiers are literally like Google Translate IRL. A new service from the company called Xerox Easy Translate lets you scan a document and it’ll plop out the other end in a different language.
All you need to do is choose the language it’s coming from and going to, then it’ll spit out the translation in the same format and look as the original document. Not only is it impressive, it’s actually a pretty cool way to instantly translate something like a restaurant menu.
Here’s the catch: it’s not free. It’s free for the first 30 translations, but after that it’s $10 for every 100 pages – that’ll get expensive, fast. The translation is done automatically, but if you really need accuracy, you can pay Xerox per word to do it manually.
Anyway, I don’t really care about any of that: this is just another cool thing that shows how far in the future we live. We might not have flying cars, but we can feed bits of paper to a machine and have them come out magically in another language, which is amazing.
➤ Xerox Easy Translate [via Engadget]
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