GOOGLE LENS
GOOGLE’S AI LETS YOU LEARN ON THE GO. Free | tinyurl.com/tla79-lens
Originally rolled out to select Android phones in March, Google Lens is now available as a standalone app, meaning it should (in theory) work on any reasonably modern Android device with a camera.
Using a device’s camera and Google’s artificial intelligence, the user hovers their phone’s cam over an object of interest, prompting the app to generate a series of ‘points of interest’ on the phone’s screen. Once one of these is tapped, Google will find corresponding results in its search engine. For example, hovering the photo over my bottle of Mount Franklin bottled water, the app was able to detect that a bottle of water was, indeed, what it was looking at, allowing me to read more about the product. More usefully, we were able to scan its barcode and bring up a price: now we know that a bottle of this water costs $2.40 on eBay.
Similarly, we were able to scan a privet in our front garden and discover that, indeed, it was a privet, with Lens offering a small handful of different privet examples (as an aside, deciduous trees don’t bring up many results when they’re without foliage).
There are more specific use cases. 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 automatically add all the details on it into your Contacts list. Similarly, scanning anything that is immediately identifiable — say, an artwork in a gallery or a landmark building — will deliver results worth perusing. These features are especially useful: imagine wandering Rome, happening upon yet another worthy looking building, and not having to do any legwork to find out what it’s called.
Unfortunately, with the version of Lens we used, it wasn’t yet possible to select text and have the app effectively scan and copy that text. This functionality was reported to be incoming as of May, but it’s yet to be supported. 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. Having a whole sentence translated will hopefully be implemented in future updates.