Google sticks goggles on the iPhone

Google is rolling out its Goggles product as part of an update to its iPhone suite, taking iPhone users right up to the bleeding edge of what even Google can achieve. We say "bleeding edge" advisedly, as Google Goggles is a very ambitious attempt to trigger internet searches based on photographs, and one that (in our …

[JaitcH]

And what happens when Apples 'me, too' software arrives?

Apple has also acquired a company with similar technology, so what happens when Apple decides to pull rank and decide whether Apple or Google software prevails?

[Phil.A]

Credit where it's due

I love the way that you're picking on the search that is obviously still in Beta, and the only search of it's kind that will allow you to look for information on items by a photo alone.

How exactly are you going to do a text search when you don't know what you're looking at, and want to find out information? You use Google Goggles, that's how!

Every book that I've looked for using Goggles has come up, every album too, even the more obscure ones in my collection.

Try actually appreciating the product for what it can do, and then maybe pick on the other companies for them failing to achieve the same thing...

[T-Unit]

Totally agree

I saw a painting I really liked in an office I was visiting recently, I snapped it with goggles and was able to find out what it was, who the artist was and several others of their, all of which I liked too.

It also worked on the vast majority of albums, books and product brands I've tested.

For the only app of it's kind (at least, the only that I've ever seen), it's pretty accomplished

[Anonymous Coward]

idiot reviewers

indeed.

I used Goggles whilst in Italy, as there were some items on the menu I didn't understand. It did an OCR translation of the menu for me. How neat is that?

[jai]

re

if you're looking up albums and books and such like, then you just need to type in the text you find on the spine

however, the OCR translation sounds brilliant - if it works, that's pretty cool

[TuckerJJ]

Die Katze in der hut

Now if they could make this work in real time with labels above all recognised objects, in a language of one's choice, that would really help me with my German language course. And then if they could put this into some actual goggles that would be awesome too.

[James 6]

Translate

It's pretty good at translating text into another language. It certianly saves the hassle of typing out a long passage of text.

[Fuzz]

What happened to the microsoft product?

http://www.technologyreview.com/biztech/18368/

worked well with DVD covers from what I can remember.

[Anonymous Coward]

This shows one thing...

Eric Schmidt is talking before he thinks things through. He said very recently (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/16/schmidt_wsj/) that people will soon have to change their names to avoid their embarrassing exploits coming back to haunt them via search engines.

I assume that he's aware of his own company's products. Are we really to believe that google will not expand goggles to recognise faces? And even if they don't, that other search engines won't pump money into this to try to get an edge in the search space?

[Argh]

Face recognition

In the past, they've said that they can already do facial recognition (I assume something along the lines of Picasa), but they purposefully disabled it due to the potential for misuse.

Who knows if this was true or not, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Already on it...

they already have face recognition in Picassa - so they already potentially have a base of information to start with

eeeeeek!

[W. Keith Wingate]

What about search & replace? What about audio?

I used to maintain course ware for a software firm as part of my role as an instructor. Re-doing all the screen shots for dialog boxes that clearly had 1.2 logos so that they said 1.3 was a PITA. I've always wanted to do search & replace by image?

I understand the iPhone has an app that will help identify a song if I can "hum a few bars".

Could that be next?

I agree with the consensus here, this technology is actually pretty cool.