Google Lens

Google’s AI lets you learn on the go. FREE | TINYURL.COM/APC457-LENS

Using a device’s camera and Google’s AI, the user hovers their camera over an object, prompting the app to generate a series of ‘points of interest’ on the phone’s screen. Once one of these are tapped, Google will find corresponding results in its search engine. For example, hovering the cam over our bottle of Mount Franklin, the app was able to detect that a bottle of water was, indeed, what it was looking at, allowing us to read more about it. We were able to scan its barcode and bring up a price. Similarly, we were able to scan a privet in our front garden and discover that, yes, it was a privet, with Lens offering a handful of different privet examples (as an aside, deciduous trees don’t bring up many results when they’re without foliage).

Scan the cover of a book and you’ll find reviews and information about it; scan a business card and you’ll be able to add all the details on it into your Contacts list. Similarly, scanning anything that is immediately identifiable — say, artwork or a landmark — will deliver results worth perusing.

Unfortunately, with the version of Lens we used, it wasn’t yet possible to scan and copy text. Similarly, we’d like to be able to have the app translate foreign text, and while it could do this with individual words, these words only came up as possible search results. To have a whole sentence translated will hopefully come in future updates.