Google has just made Google Goggles available to iPhone users. To refresh your memory, Goggles allows you to do a visual search. Normally, when you want to know more about something, you go to a search engine and type in a query. You tell the search engine what you want with your words. But what happens when you don’t know what something is or can’t describe it in words? What if you want information an object or location that you don’t know much about? That’s where Google Goggles comes in.
Using your mobile phone’s camera, it’s easy to find out more about the world around you. You search for things by pointing your camera at them. This feature has been available as an app for Android devices since December, and will now become a feature of the Google mobile app for iPhone, which already lets you speak your queries and find relevant search results based on your location.
Using Goggles is simple:
- Point your camera at whatever you would like to identify
- Click the camera button in the Google Mobile App
- Goggles will highlight the items it recognizes in the image
- Click each item to get more information
Visual search is for from an exact science and Google is quick to remind us when it won’t work. For instance, no matter how much of a social media guru you are or how many top spots you have in Google, Goggles probably won’t recognize you.
Computer vision is a hard problem and Google Goggles is still a Labs product. It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games. However, it doesn’t yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food.
Starting today, the free Google Goggles app will appear in the Apple App Store (just search for “Google Mobile App”) and will gradually begin to show up in all App stores around the world. Goggles requires a camera with auto-focus, so it is only available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 running iOS 4 and up. The feature is only available for English-speaking users.
Have you ever used Google Goggles? Will you be using it now? Tell us about it.