[4][5][6][7] According to the January 2014 New York Times article, Word Lens was free for Google Glass.

Word Lens 1.0 was released on December 16, 2010,[19] and received significant amount of attention soon after,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] including Wired,[27] The Economist,[28] CNN,[29][30] the New York Times,[31][32] Forbes,[33] the Wall Street Journal,[34] MIT Technology Review,[35] and ~2.5 million views on YouTube in the first 6 days.

[38] According to its description, Word Lens is best used on clearly printed text and was not designed to translate handwritten or stylized fonts.

[33] Further, even though the application was not designed to read books, the Wall Street Journal journalist Ben Rooney managed to understand a page from Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban.

[34] Word Lens was developed by Otavio Good, a former video game developer and the founder of Quest Visual,[1][19][30][33] John DeWeese, who previously worked on the Electronic Arts game Spore,[19][30][33] and programmers Maia Good,[33] Bryan Lin and Eric Park.

The Google Goggles application for Android and iPhone has the capability to translate text or identify objects in an image, but it requires users to take a picture with their phones, and an active internet connection.

A similar app called LookTel, designed to help blind people, scans print on objects such as packages of food and reads them aloud.

"[30] Articles in the Wall Street Journal and Tom's Guide cited Clarke's third law describing Word Lens: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

[32] In the Wall Street Journal article by Ben Rooney, Word Lens received a rating of 4/5 and was described as "a sort of magic".

Otavio Good won the 2012 Netexplo award in the category Innovation & Technology presented at the UNESCO headquarters for the creation of Word Lens.