Google will make its “Goggles” visual search and optical character recognition [OCR] application available for the iPhone later this year. The Goggles application, which Google introduced in December 2009 for the Android platform as part of its Labs experiments, allows users to easily translate text and identify products such as books, pieces of artworks, landmarks, and more by just taking a photo of them.
“We’re working on an iPhone version, and hope to have it out by the end of the year,” indicated Google Staff Engineer David Petrou today at the Hot Chips Conference at Stanford University in California, referring to a Google Goggles app for iPhone.
Petrou explained that porting Goggles to the iOS platform is not a walk in the park. “It’s actually a significant penalty [having] different code bases,” he stated. A solution that has been considered is building a web application.
However, Petrou was quick to remark the following:
“There is a new part of HTML5 that allows you to acquire an image from a camera. And that’s really nice and really useful, but we don’t think it’s sufficient for something like Goggles that needs very fine control over the camera.
The unfortunate reality is that we have to write client apps. If something were a web app, we could change and test on one per cent of our traffic, just like that.”
Petrou was also keen to remind attendees that while Google Goggles is a great application, it’s still experimental, which means that it doesn’t work 100% of the time. It still has plenty of room for improvement.
via The Register
