Google Goggles Search & Goggles Translation for Android

What is Google Goggles?

Google Goggles lets you use pictures taken with your mobile phone to search the web. There’s no need to type or speak your query. You simply have to open the app, snap a picture, and wait for your search results.

Google Goggles works better with certain types of queries. Try taking pictures of books & DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text. Currently, it’s not so good when taking pictures of animals, plants, cars, furniture, or apparel.

For the best results when taking pictures, hold your phone in “left landscape” mode, and press the on-screen shutter button with your right thumb.

Goggles Translation

Google introduced a new feature of Google Goggles – Goggles translation – that is useful to travelers. The Google Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It can translate into those languages, plus Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Galician, Icelandic, Irish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish. Google says it is working hard to extend the recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages and eventually read non-Latin languages such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic as well.

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Google Goggles v1.1 is available on devices running Android 1.6 and higher. To see which version of Android you’re running, go to Settings > About phone > Firmware version. To download Google Goggles, go to the Android Market app on your phone and search for “Google Goggles”.

In order to use Goggles to translate text, point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words and press the shutter button. If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate. Now press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

In addition to translation, Goggles v1.1 features improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery. [more]