Sogou Tangmao Dictionary Pen Review: A portable "smart teacher" that can translate English and ancient poems

As the process of globalization intensifies, the importance of English in daily life in the future is self-evident. Therefore, all parents probably do not want their children to lose at the starting line of English learning.

However, most parents are either busy with work or have limited English proficiency, making it difficult for them to personally tutor their children. So, they can only let their children learn English by themselves with a dictionary? Based on this, the Tangmao dictionary pen produced by Sogou solves this problem for parents and brings such a unique and targeted product - a dictionary translation pen that can translate both Chinese and English.

Although the appearance of the Tangmao dictionary pen produced by Sogou is very small, it has the functions of scanning and translating, more than 100,000 ancient poems, and simultaneous translation of 63 languages, which fully meets the learning needs of students. I guess many parents are also very curious about this. How is this product used? Today, please follow us to experience this product.

The large curvature design makes it easier for children to hold.

Taking into consideration that the users are younger students, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen adopts a lot of curves and simple colors as a whole. One of the great advantages of this is that it is more gentle visually and easier for children to accept.

On the front of the body, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen has a 1.9-inch touch screen. Because the touch controls are deliberately made large enough, its touch interaction is very precise, which minimizes accidental touches by children.

There is a dark gray raised design on the bottom of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen. This structure, which is different from the main body of the pen, has two major functions: one is to house the USB Type-C interface, and the other is to play sound. The color of the raised structure echoes the scanning area on the top, which increases the sense of stability of the whole machine.

In addition to the touch interaction at the software level, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen also has three mechanical buttons on the side of the body. The red button on the left is the power button, which plays the role of turning the screen on and off. The adjacent button on the right is used to control the volume under normal circumstances, and in the dialogue translation scenario, it plays the role of controlling the recording switch.

Since it is necessary to scan words, the top of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen adopts an elastic device + transparent window design. In this way, on the one hand, it can be clearly scanned or not, and on the other hand, the scanned content can be viewed in real time, killing two birds with one stone. It is worth noting that because the body design is symmetrical and takes left-handed users into consideration, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen not only supports right-handed scanning, but also supports left-handed scanning, which makes the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen cover almost all people.

In general, Tangmao has fully considered the usage scenarios and target audiences. Not only has it made the Tangmao dictionary pen portable enough, but it also has an excellent grip, truly achieving a high degree of unity between function and design.

A real English learning tool

Since it is called a "dictionary pen", the biggest highlight of the Tangmao dictionary pen is of course translation. Through actual use experience, we found that the translation function of the pen has three main highlights.

First: The Tangmao Dictionary Pen has a built-in Sogou "Concise Dictionary", which, combined with the exclusive neural network translation technology, not only covers the key vocabulary from elementary school to university, but also can achieve the translation effect of CET-8.

Second, the Tangmao dictionary pen can scan an average of 60 words per minute, and the recognition accuracy can reach 98%;

Third, all the above operations can be completed offline.

Considering that children cannot be in a WiFi environment all the time, based on the third highlight, the first two highlights of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen can bring deeper value to children's learning.

Of course, official propaganda cannot represent actual experience. Therefore, we selected two different levels of difficulty, a sixth-grade English textbook and the English novel "The Little Prince", to test the translation speed and quality of the Tangmao Dictionary Pen.

In offline mode, we first used the exercises in the sixth grade English textbook as the test object. In the actual test, we let the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen scan an English sentence at a normal reading speed. As a result, the next second after the scanning was completed, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen recognized the English and immediately gave the corresponding Chinese meaning.

Afterwards, we switched to the more difficult novel "The Little Prince" and turned on the "multi-line recognition" function of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen, allowing the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen to scan a whole sentence continuously. As a result, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen still ensured the scanning quality on the basis of high efficiency.

It is worth noting that after the scan is completed, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen will automatically separate the words. Once the user clicks on an unfamiliar character, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen will give a detailed explanation of the word and also provide a follow-up function to correct the user's pronunciation.

After completing the most basic "dictionary" function, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen did not stop there, but added the "conversation translation" function. It is reported that the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen supports real-time conversation translation between 63 languages ​​in 200 countries and Chinese.

When actually using it, we only need to set the other party's language on the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen, press and hold the red "power button", speak Chinese, and the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen will automatically translate it into English and play it through the speaker. The other party follows the same method to communicate with us, and we can hear the corresponding Chinese content.

After actual testing, the "dialogue translation" function of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen is no different from scanning translation in terms of recognition rate, accuracy and translation speed. This greatly expands the scope of use of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen. Even when traveling abroad, children can communicate with local people without obstacles through the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen, which will surely greatly enhance children's interest in linguistics.

Overall, Sogou starts from the two dimensions of picture and sound, so that the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen accurately hits the pain points of children learning English. Combined with humanized human-computer interaction, it can bring children a different learning experience in both listening and speaking, greatly improving students' efficiency in learning English.

How to Solve the Problems of Ancient Poetry

Although the main function of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen is translation, considering that children's needs are diverse, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen also has Chinese language functions.

Considering that many children have just learned to read, they will encounter many uncommon Chinese characters when reading. Therefore, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen also supports the function of scanning and recognizing Chinese characters. According to Sogou's official introduction, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen has more than 630,000 Chinese dictionary entries and more than 520,000 words.

When actually using it, we only need to point the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen at the unfamiliar Chinese characters and scan them. The Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen will then give a detailed introduction to the radical, component, pronunciation, etc. of the Chinese character. At the bottom of the page, it will also give the corresponding English word for the Chinese character and the pronunciation of the word.

On the other hand, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen not only scans Chinese text, but also realizes the function of "Chinese to English". Combined with the "English to Chinese" mentioned above, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen solves the problem of English learning from two opposing aspects, which must be of great benefit to students.

The biggest difficulty in learning Chinese may be some unfamiliar ancient Chinese poems. In order to solve this problem, the Tangmao Dictionary Pen has also added the function of learning ancient poems.

Just like scanning English and Chinese characters, when we encounter an ancient poem that we don’t recognize, we just need to scan it with the Tangmao Dictionary Pen, and the Tangmao Dictionary Pen will give the pronunciation, meaning and full text introduction of the poem.

Although scanning Chinese is not the biggest selling point of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen, from this function, Sogou obviously hopes to give full play to the full capabilities of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen hardware, so we also see the Chinese scanning and recognition function that ordinary products do not have. From this perspective, it can also be seen that Sogou's products have a very high sense of mission and responsibility.

Students' portable smart teacher

In addition to dictionaries and translations, Sogou also hopes to strengthen the Tangmao Dictionary Pen's learning assistant functions. Therefore, we saw two major functions: classroom recording and encyclopedia Q&A.

The reason why the Tangmao Dictionary Pen has added a classroom recording function is mainly because Sogou takes into account the fleeting nature of classroom time, and thus helps children record classroom sounds in real time so that they can better review after class.

Sogou introduced that the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen supports recording up to 3 meters, so we spoke to the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen at a normal volume from 3 meters away to test its recording ability. From the playback recording, we can find that the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen can not only clearly record the human voice, but also cleverly filter out the noisy noise of the environment. It must be able to clearly record every word of the teacher in the classroom scene.

On the other hand, considering that students often encounter some special and targeted problems, the Tangmao Dictionary Pen has added the function of a voice assistant.

For example, if we don’t know who is the author of “Quiet Night Thoughts”, we can directly ask the voice assistant of the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen “Who is the author of “Quiet Night Thoughts”?” Then, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen will tell us that it is “Li Bai”. This function will surely solve many problems in children’s lives.

A must-have for students in the new era

In the previous decade, the development of mobile Internet and microelectronics industry has led to an explosive growth in smartphones. However, looking back, the continuous development of new technologies seems to have left out some special groups of people, such as students.

Fortunately, Sogou saw the problem in this area and used its extremely keen product sense to create the Tangmao Dictionary Pen, an intelligent hardware product that focuses on translation and dictionary.

More importantly, Sogou was not bound by demand. On the contrary, based on its focus on translation, dictionary and other functions, it expanded in all directions, making the Tangmao Dictionary Pen have revolutionary functions such as ancient poetry learning, classroom recording, and encyclopedia Q&A.

In fact, if you consider it from another angle, the Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen with the above functions is no longer a smart hardware product in the pure sense - instead it has some kind of teacher meaning.

Therefore, if parents want their children to keep up with the trend in the smart era, then equipping them with a Sugar Cat Dictionary Pen is definitely the right choice.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.