Google has just announced a new feature in Goggles that will enable mobile phone users to pull foreign text out of images they have taken with their phone and translate that text into another language.
The feature is likely to prove useful to all those who are travelling abroad and who can’t understand foreign text written on the likes of signposts, menus, books, posters and so on.
The Internet search engine giant first outlined plans for the service back in February at the mobile phone congress in Barcelona, and now it has become a reality.
To take advantage of the service you need to have Google Goggles v1.1 on a device running Android 1.6 or higher.
All you have to do is point your phone at whatever text it is that you don’t understand, draw a box round it using the region of interest button and take the photo.
If Goggles recognises the text as being English, French, Italian, German or Spanish, it will offer the option to translate that text into one of many more languages, including Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Galician, Icelandic, Irish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish and even Afrikaans, just press the translate button to select both the source and the destination language and away you go.
Google also hope to increase the number of languages in the future to include non Latin based languages such as Chinese, Hindu and Arabic too.
Other new features included with Goggles v1.1 include “improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery” said Google on a company blog.
Google still have some challenges to overcome but they are working on it.
“Computer vision is a hard problem. While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize. The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.”
Google Goggles can give you more information about your surroundings too, just point the phone in landscape view and pan your surroundings. Once your GPS signal has been locked, labels tagged to nearby businesses will start to appear on your phone.
Cool or what!
