Mountain View, California — Google’s latest Goggles application for Android devices helps annotate the world around you. Google search is now getting both sight and sound, moving beyond the typically typed key words to let people scour the Internet with mobile telephone cameras or spoken words in multiple languages. A new Google service Monday unveiled as “Goggles” application that allows smartphone users to take a picture and submit it as a query to Google’s search engine.
The new application, which was announced earlier this week, enabled smartphone users take a snap and search using pictures instead of words. It is available on phones that are run by Google’s mobile operating system Android, which states on its homepage: “No need to type your search any more. Just take a picture.”
The application decides what the picture is and returns a number of results in the phone’s browser. Focus the camera at the label on a bottle of wine and Google will return tasting notes. Users point their phone’s camera on an object, and Google compares elements of that picture against its database of images. When it finds a match, Google will tell you the name of what you are looking at, and provide a list of results linking through to the relevant web pages and news stories.
Google Goggles: Search results after taking a photograph of a book cover.
The Google Goggles software has a database of more than one billion images and can distinguish landmarks, CD covers, logos, barcodes, books, shopfronts and business cards. Even then, Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice-president of engineering, admitted that the service was limited.
“Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories,” he said. “It is our goal to be able to identify any image.” The application is available as a free download on phones that run on Android.
“Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words,” said Shailesh Nalawadi, product manager for Google Goggles. “For many search queries, using an image to search is easier and more useful than text alone, especially on a mobile phone. Computer vision technology is still in its infancy, but Goggles demonstrates its potential.”
“We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities. You can imagine a future where visual searching is as natural as pointing your finger.”
“When you carry a mobile phone camera and connect it to the Internet, it becomes an eye,” Gundotra said while demonstrating Goggles in Mountain View, California. It also revealed improvements to Google search-by-voice and search-by-location services.
Google’s move is part of its attempt to reinvent search for the mobile web. People with mobile phones can find it frustrating to type words into a search box, so companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are seeking ways to allow them to search by voice and — now — by image.
Google still dominates the internet search market, boasting a global share of about 70 per cent share globally. Google reached a deal in October to blend Twitter updates, or “tweets,” into its results, but had not explained how its system would work until Monday.