Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Google Goggles learns Russian and gets a new view

Some of you may already be using the new optical character recognition (OCR) and translation of Russian in Google Goggles that we previewed at last week’s Inside Search event. Starting today, we’re pleased to introduce some additional new features, including a map view of your Search History and the ability to copy contact and text results to the clipboard. We’ve also changed the results interface to make it easier to view and navigate through your results.

Russian optical character recognition (OCR) and translation
Since Google Goggles first launched in 2009, it has been able to recognize and translate text in a number of different languages, as long as the language used Latin characters. With the launch of OCR for Russian, Goggles is now able to read Cyrillic characters. Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text and allow you to translate the text into one of over 40 other languages. Russian OCR is also available for users of Google Goggles on the Google Search app for iOS. Очень полезно!

You can take a picture of Russian text and translate it into over 40 languages.


Map view of your search history
If you’ve enabled search history on Goggles, your history contains a list of all the images that you’ve searched for, as well as some information about where you performed the search if you chose to share your location with Google. Sometimes this can be a pretty long list, so we wanted to give you another way to sort and visualize your Goggles results.

We’ve added a map view, which shows your Goggles image search history on a map so you can quickly zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location.

Easily toggle between map view and list view with the button in the upper right.


Copy contact and text results to clipboard
Finally, imagine that you wanted to grab a URL or telephone number from a sign and email it to yourself. Now, Goggles gives you the option of copying the recognized text to your phone’s clipboard, allowing you to paste the test into a number of applications.

To try these new features download Google Goggles 1.5 from Android Market, or scan the QR code below with your phone.


Posted by George Nachman, Software Engineer
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10 comments:

  1. dommageJune 22, 2011 at 9:37 AM

    if you manage to implement the georgian and armenian language and alphabet until the end of july you would be my absolute heroes! (an i will be saved on my vacation…)

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJune 22, 2011 at 10:16 AM

    Actually it not working good yet.
    For example, I just made a Funny screenshot :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJune 22, 2011 at 10:20 AM

    Another example

    ReplyDelete
  4. ernestJune 23, 2011 at 2:28 AM

    Image search will be an important feature in future smartphones. It's much easier to just point and shoot an image than having to type search strings in a smartphone's small screen. The technology is developing fast, and it will be exciting to see how well future iterations of the software performs.

    - Ernest Ramos
    Mobile Application Development

    ReplyDelete
  5. orieJune 23, 2011 at 5:57 AM

    It recognizes a series of latin letters and punctuation instead of Russian text.

    You should enable a webform to let people upload such cases, so that you can improve your algorithms.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Lukman Dharma HolisJune 26, 2011 at 1:17 PM

    I suggest to detect Indonesian:)
    It must have been very useful

    ReplyDelete
  7. MagentoJune 26, 2011 at 9:38 PM

    Its really a nice post.But is it available in Indian languages?


    Web Design Bahrain

    ReplyDelete
  8. UnknownJune 28, 2011 at 8:40 AM

    It should be "paste the text" not "paste the test" right?

    ReplyDelete
  9. ChristinaJuly 1, 2011 at 12:40 AM

    Can you tell me if the Hungarian language is available with OCR? THX!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Junaid AhmedJuly 2, 2011 at 1:29 AM

    Nice And Looks Good Also (:
    -----------------------
    Nokia Applications

    ReplyDelete

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