Google Visual Search Coming Soon to Android

Several sources have shared the news that "Google Goggles," publicly known as Google Visual Search, will be "coming soon" to an Android phone near you. Rather than typing in the search term, you will be able to just take a picture with your phone and search results will be returned. The new search was recently featured on CNBC's "Inside the Mind of Google." Unfortunately Goggles didn't pass muster with a recent focus group, so it could be a while before Google decides this is ready to hit the streets.

Re:Great Idea, but...

[Sockatume]

Google Similar Images is offered, and works quite well, for images of a poorer resolution than even the crappiest phone cams on sale today. Besides, Android handsets have your location and view direction already, which cuts the problem down enormously. I suspect they could do it without any image recognition at all and get remarkably good results.

Re:Great Idea, but...

[clone53421]

Interesting. Similar Images doesn’t let you upload any old image, which is unfortunate, but it is a worthwhile tool to add to my online toolbelt.

Tineye [tineye.com], on the other hand, lets you upload any picture (or give it a URL) and it attempts to find similar images using actual image recognition. It is supposed to work for cropped, rotated, composite, or re-coloured images. I find its results to be pretty impressive, sometimes. They do need to expand their image database, though.

For instance. [tineye.com]

Re:Great Idea, but...

[FallinWithStyle]

There are already several barcode scanners on the Android marketplace. There are also apps [snaptell.com] that let you scan the cover of DVD's or other small items to retrieve pricing and other information in a hurry -- these work pretty well. At the very least, it would be cool to have the ability to take a picture of some blob of text and receive an OCR conversion on the phone. Though the 3.2MP camera on my G1 may struggle a bit with shooting some text clearly, I would think more powerful cameras (like the 5MP one equipped with the Motorola Droid) wouldn't have much of a problem.

Re:Why don't they focus on things that matter?

[Delwin]

Quickoffice comes default on the Droid. It has no problem reading PDF's.