Of all the mobile applications that Google has come out with in the past couple of years, Google Goggles is definitely one of the coolest. You point your smartphone at any object, and Google attempts to figure out what it is — and it’s actually pretty good at it. And now it’s gaining two pretty interesting features. Well, one interesting and one awesome.
The first is the ability to recognize print ads. Yes, you can now point your smartphone at an ad in a magazize or newspaper and Google will recognize the brand or product and return results for it. Google says that this will work for major U.S. newspaper and magazine ads from August 2010 onward. → Read More
Back in October, we came across a mysterious site called Google Demo Slam a couple days before it actually launched. It turned out to be a fun site featuring demos of different Google products where you can watch two demos side by side and vote for the best one.
Some of the demos are by Google engineers, but anyone can submit their own and vie to become a Google Demo Slam champ. Below are a few of the best demos on the site so far. The first one is four guys pretending to be Mount Rushmore and doing such a good job that they fool Google Goggles into identifying them as the real thing. The second shows two women using Google Translate to get their computer to order Indian food in Hindi. The third one demonstrates how to give yourself a haircut using Google Chat and two computers. And the fourth one recreates a road trip on Route 66 with Google Street View, a couple couches, and a projector. (Videos after the jump). → Read More
Google Goggles, the search giant’s mobile visual search technology, is getting a new test case: advertisements. Google is working with a number of high-profile brands, including Buick, Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile and Delta Airlines to offer “Goggles-enabled” print ads.
When users take pictures of these individual ads with Google Goggles on their Android or iPhone, they will be able to click to a mobile website from the brand. → Read More
One of the biggest downsides of being in the iPhone camp rather than the Android camp is not getting early access to some of the cooler mobile things Google is working on. One of those is Google Goggles, a visual search feature that launched last December for Android. Now, almost a year later, it’s finally here for the iPhone as well.
As they’ve announced on their Google Mobile Blog today, Google has placed Google Goggles for the iPhone as a feature inside of their Google Mobile app on the device. That app, which already allows you to search via text and via voice, now is even more powerful. → Read More
In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.
Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating “Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon” from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at right). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don’t speak the language. → Read More
Patience is a virtue, but as tech fanatics who lap up the latest in hardware and software, we’ve not enirely familiar with that concept. So when we heard that it could take up to a few days for the Nexus One Android OTA update, it was a little disheartening. We want it now! And thanks to some clever folks over at Android Forums, we can get it right this moment. It just takes some simple tinkering and you should be good to go. → Read More
It’s one thing for Google to talk about how cool its new Goggles service is, and to show it off in staged demo videos — it’s another to see it in action. Our own Jason Kincaid was at Google’s Search Event in Mountain View today and got a chance to get a real world demo of Google Goggles. The service, which is currently an application for Android, is impressive.
Watch below: → Read More
Today, at their Search Event in Mountain View, Google demoed a brand new product set to launch in Google Labs: Google Goggles. Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.
The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra showed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots. You also be able to use Goggles to look up things such as CD covers and bar codes (this is likely similar to the popular Android app ShopSavvy). For text, Google Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to try and read things like labels to aid the search. → Read More
