Google Lens Can Now Read Translated Text To You and Highlight Top Meals at Restaurants

Today Google introduced new features for Lens, its visual search and computer vision tool that can recognize plants, animals, text, celebrities, and over a billion shopping items. From a report: Google Lens will soon be able to highlight top meals at a restaurant simply by pointing your camera at the menu. The news was shared today at Google's I/O developer conference at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Also coming soon: Split a bill or calculate a tip by after a meal by pointing your camera at your receipt, and read signs and other text for people who can't read or don't understand the native language.

Act Fast

[Aighearach]

You better hurry if you want that menu read to you in Klingon, they're gonna cancel it next week.

long overdue

[olsmeister]

I can't tell you how many times I've sat down at a nice restaurant, been handed a menu, and thought to myself "damn I wish Google could tell me what to order."

WTF are "Top Meals"?

[jtara]

Is that like Top Ramen?

So, they are going to highlight the meals that the restaurant highlights with menu layout tricks?

Or, are they basing it on popularity? (Which they determine how?)

Or, are they basing it on some BS AI that categorizes (what?) as "top"?

Re:

[apoc.famine]

Although the article doesn't have any additional information, my guess is that they're scraping from Google's reviews. Hop into google maps and click a place to eat, or search for a name and you'll see the reviews Google has on them. Looking at a couple nearby places I can see the reviews have menu items in them, so they're probably just searching for the menu keywords in the reviews and mapping the stars to the items.

That said, who would let anonymous other people choose their food? There's no guarantee th

that and instagram

[DrYak]

that (scraping reviews for keywords) and probably some scraping of instagram: the plates the most posted in instagram are probably the most popular, and as part of their google image search, they probably already have half of the necessary tools to pull that one off.

Seems pretty straight forward...

[gatfirls]

I would think they could just do analytics with AI from all of the various places that store review information and determine the most and least popular dishes from that that for pretty much any restaurant. I know if I am out of town and there is some restaurant I don't know of with good reviews I check the comments to see what dish people like or don't like there. I would also think google has AI good enough at this point to do this pretty accurately.

I would probably trust that a lot more than a waitress

sigh

[BlackOverflow]

Every day when I read this stuff I want to get farther away from all technology. This stuff isn't living. It's a future I want nothing to do with.

Just don't use it?

[cruff]

You can always ignore it. It's not like the government is going to force these to be surgically implanted in front of your eyes. Oh wait, maybe they will.

Re:

[jbmartin6]

I know, I already encounter too many people who refuse to go to a restaurant without checking the reviews first, or even worse will refuse to go if the place has only three stars even if you are in a huge hurry and there is no need or expectation of a top-notch experience. Now those clowns will refuse to order if the Google-determined "top dish" isn't available.

From TFA

[BringsApples]

This is in the article:

Also coming soon:

- Split a bill or calculate a tip by after a meal by pointing your camera at your receipt
- Read signs and other text for people who can’t read or don’t understand the printed language

As cool as that may sound, it’s not perfect. Text recognition can be pretty accurate, but its object recognition can occasionally mistaken weeds for trees or cats as caterpillars.

Sounds useless.

Re:

[Aighearach]

Yeah, well, I know from experience that point-of-sale software often is very low quality, and has trouble splitting tickets. Not because it lacks the feature, just because it is buggy and too hard for the server to do exactly right in the presence of the bugs.

So there is a way that the experience could be improved for many people; if they're paying via Google instead of using a credit card! In that case, Google can handle the split, the restaurant only sees one payment, and the POS doesn't fuck anybody up.

B

Re:

[JaredOfEuropa]

Useful enough. I don’t use Lens but I’ve used the Seek app (an app that recognised plant and animal species) to identify stuff around the garden. It’s pretty good at identifying birds, and while it didn’t always identify the exact species of plants, it always got the family right. Impressive since nothing’s in bloom at the moment, the app had to go by the leaves. Pretty handy for someone who knows bugger all about this stuff

Re:

[BringsApples]

That does sound pretty cool, but since it's not 100% accurate, you could get with your local county extension office [pickyourown.org]. They're 100% accurate.

Re:

[Aighearach]

Nobody wants to have to fight the Kraken, but everybody wants the power to give the order, "Release the Kraken!"

You seem to just be passively noting the existence of part of the problem. Maybe you should consider something more active, like taking personal responsibility for if you asked google what to eat, or not? If you didn't ask, it didn't tell you.

Misleading Phrasing

[Alwin Barni]

Google Lens will soon be able to highlight top meals at a restaurant simply by pointing your camera at the menu.

I think the article meant: "Google Lens will soon be able to highlight meals, which the restaurant would like the most to be ordered."