Mountain View, California — Late last year, Google rolled out a very cool mobile product called Google Goggles. The Mountain View, Calif., search engine leader Google on Thursday released an enhanced version of its Goggles application to read and translate English, French, Italian, German, or Spanish after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones based on its Android operating systems be used as language translation tools.
At the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday, conference co-chair and publisher Tim O’Reilly commented, “If you invent for the world that exists now, you are behind the curve.”
“We are hard at work broadening our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages,” Google software engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said in a message posted at the California firm’s website.
“Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.”
Google, in other words, is formulating the technological infrastructure of the future, where the U.S. and English play a smaller role and other countries and languages have become more active online.
Google Goggles is an app which lets you take a picture of an object on your smartphone and have it recognized. Previously, Goggles empowered users of Android mobile phones to take pictures of certain things — landmarks, contact information, books, artwork, places, wine labels, and product logos — and to submit the resulting images as visual queries. Ideally, Google’s image recognition technology would then deliver search results identifying the objects.
However, with the latest release, v1.1, Google has now broadened the range of things its system can recognize to include text in five languages. But instead of telling you more about the product pictured, Google Goggles translates the text into the language of your choice. The company presented an example of this technology that could only recognize German in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages,” said Google engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz in a blog post.
Currently, the visual character identification of Goggles is limited to five languages with Latin-based alphabets: English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, but more are going to added as time goes on. It will also only work on phones running Android 1.6 or higher, so iPhone and BlackBerry owners are out of luck.
This is a cool creation that could help everyone who has foreign holidays and who can not be bothered to learn the language. To download it, scan the QR code on Google’s blog post or visit Google’s Android Market and search for “google goggles.”