So was Word Lens doing this before Google even bought them? Because Word Lens worked fine, locally on a phone, long before Google was doing it's whole deep learning thing.
It's not entirely clear to me, but this sentence from the article:
In the end, we were able to get our networks to give us significantly better results while running about as fast as our old system—great for translating what you see around you on the fly.
Suggests that they previously were not using neural networks, or were using less powerful ones.
