Launched last December, Google Goggles is capable of recognizing the user's snapshots and translating them. It runs on Android smartphones equipped with cameras. Google Goggles can also match snapshots with popular search returns for landmarks, book covers, artwork, places and even corporate logos.
Google has revamped the Goggles mobile app it launched in December to make it simple for owners of camera-enabled Android handsets to translate signs, menus, articles or just about any other text-based visual message from languages such as English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish to the user's own native language. The handset owner merely needs to take a snapshot of the item to be translated and Google will do the rest.
The new Goggles Translate feature should prove useful to travelers who are unfamiliar with the languages native to the locales they visit, noted Google Software Engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz in a blog.
"Here's how it works: Point your phone at a word or phrase, use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words" and "press the shutter button," Bissacco and Flamholz wrote. "If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate. Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages."
Translations On The Fly
Earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google showed off a prototype of Goggles with the ability to recognize German text. The new release demonstrates that the search engine giant is well on the way to offering translation capabilities in the 52 languages supported by Google Chrome to mobile users on the fly.
"We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages," Bissacco and Flamholz wrote. "Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages, such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, as well."
Launched last December, Google Goggles is also capable of recognizing the user's snapshots and matching them up with popular search returns for landmarks, book covers, artwork, places and even corporate logos. What's more, Android handset owners are now able to search the Web using pictures.
Additionally, the new Goggles v1.1 also features enhanced barcode recognition and an improved user interface, according to Bissacco and Flamholz. Available on mobile handsets running Android 1.6 and higher, the new software app can be downloaded from Thursday at Android Market.
A Hard Problem To Solve
When the user connects the phone's camera to datacenters in the cloud Relevant Products/Services, it becomes an eye to see and search with, noted Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra.
"It sees the world like you do, but it simultaneously taps the world's info in ways that you can't," Gundotra wrote in a blog last December. "And this makes it a perfect answering machine for your visual questions."
Still, Google software engineers Bissacco and Flamholz admit that making computer vision work -- especially on mobile devices with limited amounts of processor power and memory -- is a difficult problem to solve.
"We know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize," Bissacco and Flamholz wrote Thursday. "The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see."
To help beef up its visual search capabilities, last month Google acquired privately owned Plink in order to add the start-up's mobile search engine product to its Goggles tool kit. Now Plinks' co-founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin are working to help Google Goggles improve all aspects of the visual search experience.
