Have you ever typed Google and accidentally ended up with Goggles, well it’s going to happen a whole lot more now we have to write about Google Goggles, a new application on Android Market from Google, which we must say looks fantastic.
It’s a visual search engine where a picture is the search criteria instead of a word. It is this type of innovation that will put applications onto Android to make them stand out against the raft of iPhone applications written by smaller developers.
The way this works on an Android phone is that you open Google Goggles and then take a picture of say a landmark or a book or a piece of art, and Google will tell you what it is. If you point the camera at a place or a shop, it will tell you its name and give you more info. This second system uses Google maps, your GPS and the internal compass, so it’s a second approach inside the same application.
In effect Google Goggles is both a local search tool and an image recognition system, combined with your phone camera, and as yet Google says it’s early days and that things like food, cars, plants or animals don’t really work. Later Google sees it working on things like a leaf to tell you what sort of tree it came from, but not quite yet. Fancifully, it thinks that it will be able to take a picture of a chess game and make suggestions for moves also, but again, not yet.
In our view it is a genuine new paradigm. Most video or image search tools are accessed using words ‘ and Google is perhaps not so good as specialists such as Blinkx for video search, because these approaches depend upon extracting words from the image, using things like closed captioning, scripts and voice recognition. This system clearly works on pattern recognition against a vast Google database of images, carried out within the network, so it’s clearly a cloud application.
‘Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words,’ said Shailesh Nalawadi, the product manager for Google Goggles. ‘For many search queries, using an image to search is easier and more useful than text alone, especially on a mobile phone. Computer vision technology is still in its infancy, but Goggles demonstrates its potential. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities. You can imagine a future where visual searching is as natural as pointing your finger.’
Google Goggles is available as a free downloadable application in Android Market. It is currently available in English around the world.