Traveling to another country can be an amazing experience. The
opportunity to immerse yourself in a different culture can give you a
new perspective. However, it can be hard to fully enjoy the experience
if you do not understand the local language. For example, ordering food
from a menu you can not read can be an adventure. Today we are
introducing a new feature of Google Goggles that will prove useful to
travelers and monoglots everywhere: Goggles translation.
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 - Press
the shutter button - If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give
you the option to translate - Press the translate button to
select the source and destination languages.
The first Goggles translation prototype was unveiled earlier this year
at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and could only recognize
German text. Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and
Spanish and can translate to many more languages. Google’s team is
working hard extending the recognition capabilities to other Latin-based
languages. Their goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such
as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.
Every new release of Google Goggles contains at least one new feature
and a large number of improvements to the existing functionality. In
addition to translation, Goggles v1.1 features 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.
Computer vision is a hard problem. Although the Goggles v1.1 has been
released, we know that there are many images that Goggles 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 v1.1 is available on devices running Android 1.6 and
higher. To download, please go to the Android Market app on your phone
and search for “Google Goggles”.
