The Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt demonstrated an early version of an awesome text translating feature in Google Goggles — an image-based search application. At the time, the feature was still an early prototype, and therefore could only recognize and translate German. Luckily, Google just announced on the Official Google Mobile Blog that the feature, which is now properly called “Goggles Translation,” is now ready and available in version 1.1 of Google Goggles.
Goggles Translation has definitely come a long way. The feature is now able to recognize English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and translate them into even more languages — which can come very useful when traveling abroad. At the moment, Google is focusing on Latin-based languages. However, their ultimate goal is for the application to be able to recognize non-Latin languages such as Hindi, Russian, Chinese, et al.
According to Google, this is how Goggles Translation works:
- Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
- Press the shutter button
- If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
- Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.
Additionally, Google states that the new version 1.1 of Google Goggles includes various enhancements to existing features. For instance, barcode recognition and the user interface have been improved, there’s now a larger roster of artworks, more products and logos are now recognized, and now visual search can be initiated using images in the phone’s photo gallery.
Google “recognizes” [get it?] that the application and many of its features still need a lot of work. The Google Goggles engineers are working hard to improve many of the existing technical issues. Google Goggles is available for Android 1.6 and higher, and can be found in the Android Market. Use the QR Code below to be redirected.