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Google Lens Can Now Copy and Paste Handwritten Notes To Your Computer (theverge.com) 25

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Google has added a very useful feature to Google Lens, its multipurpose object recognition tool. From a report: You can now copy and paste handwritten notes from your phone to your computer with Lens, though it only works if your handwriting is neat enough. In order to use the new feature, you need to have the latest version of Google Chrome as well as the standalone Google Lens app on Android or the Google app on iOS (where Lens can be accessed through a button next to the search bar). You'll also need to be logged in to the same Google account on both devices. That done, simply point your camera at any handwritten text, highlight it on-screen, and select copy. You can then go to any document in Google Docs, hit Edit, and then Paste to paste the text. And voila -- or, viola, depending on your handwriting.
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Google Lens Can Now Copy and Paste Handwritten Notes To Your Computer More

Google Lens Can Now Copy and Paste Handwritten Notes To Your Computer

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  • What's everyone using nowadays to categorize and OCR stuff that is in their pictures collection? The default ones in most of my devices (iOS or Android) are terrible. For example, the iOS photo album is terrible at image recognition and doesn't even seem to attempt OCR from what I can gather.

    • OCR? No solution that I know of. Without neural nets you only get the precision of FineReader from around the year 2005. And phones don't have those.

      Categorize? No need for anything. All tagging and categorizing solutions are just standard file system features, recreated. Badly.
      Dump your pictures in one large pool directory. Then create a directory structure where each directory is considered a tag. Now put a softlink or hardlink of a picture, depending on your needs, into a tag directory to tag it with tha

      • I see. Well then, it looks like there is no user friendly solution .. it seems this is an app creation opportunity for someone then.

    • OneDrive's OCR is very good. Its image categorization though is garbage.

  • I have been using google translate handwriting tool input for a while. Quite impressive, I can write in quite bad penmanship in Tamil and it would convert to clean printable, unicode encoded Tamil words. Even the speech to text is quite impressive in Tamil, but you need to imitate a news readers diction and cadence to get it to work right. It is possible Tamil support is quite good because Alphabet CEO himself might be an active user. Products tend to be good when the C Suite eats its own dog food. If GM f
    • What I would like to see is something that can recognize and clean up simple hand-drawn diagrams like flow charts or tables. There's usually a good deal of those in the notes I take.

    • Not that impressive, if you see the hardware being involved.

      Call me when my phone has a *realistic* neural net simulation chip built-in. And I will install a much better open source solution, with a few of my patches.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Call me when my phone has a *realistic* neural net simulation chip built-in. And I will install a much better open source solution, with a few of my patches.

        Modern phones do have neural accelerators. And they can run various AI toolkits. Qualcomm processors especially around the 835/845/855 and 865 models can run TensorFlow Lite with the accelerator, or you can make better use of it using Qualcomm's SNPE library.

        All available for download now for apps. Nothing's really stopping use. SNPE is nice in that it

  • I can add jotting down notes electronically back into my workflow. Something that I had to drop when pen computers faded away and thus Palm Graffiti as well. Now the only remaining hurdle is remove the requirement for physical paper and we'll be as advanced as we were 20 years ago.

    For what it's worth, I've worked on product development of more recent tables with pen support. I even wrote multitouch+pen drivers for one of them (because it was not android based). Pen support is not something the consumer mark

    • Not by long shot. Unless you like literally being a PP (privacy prostitute).

      And paper will never go away completely. As it is a cheap convenient screen with a very low refresh rate. Perfect for static long term displays.

      • Being cheap is great. I'm not convinced that paper is convenient, at least not in ways that people may value. Paper will go away as the primary means of recording ephemeral information within our lifetime. Just as using paper for long term archives have ended in some industries. Duplicating, retrieving, sharing, searching, versioning, collaborative editing, ... I think we could construct a pretty large list of conveniences that physical paper lacks. Either consumers will demand some of these features, or re

  • Just as a reminder, this involves nontrivial machine learning. There's no way Google can do this without involving the cloud, which means you're sharing your handwritten notes with them, thus increasing the content Google has to target ads, etc.

    • Indeed. I specifically opt in to this. It's amazing what engineers have achieved thanks to people sharing their handwriting.

    • Google already sees everything you search for, and even if you don't use Google, just about every Web site in the world sends your browsing history to Google on the back end, in order to get Google Analytics capabilities. I'm pretty sure that my handwriting won't give Google anything useful, that it doesn't already have about me.

      I'd rather have my data in the hands of a big company that everybody is watching, than in the hands of some no-name outfit in the shadows.

  • Where "advertisers" stands for: Organizatioms that try to manipulate you into wasting money and votes and arguments for things that are not the best choice you would have made with a reasonable mind, and hence actively harmful to you, like a neural assault, by using ALL the creepy psychological and NLP tactics and precisely zero qualms or morals.

    Which, fun fact, was literally born out of snake oil salesmen.

    So yeah. Fuck off, and take your somehow still legal organized crime with you.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Yeah nah. Google is an advertising platform and thus never actually hands your data to advertisers. That would be like Coke giving away their recipe to people so they can make their own at home.

      But I expected nothing less from Slashdot's dumbest poster. Seriously man you put the AC's to shame, even their racist rants are more on point than you are.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        But I expected nothing less from Slashdot's dumbest poster.

        There's lots of competition for that coveted title these days. Check out Way Smarter Than You, and of course AHuxley.

  • This is like the Apple Newton?
  • Do they keep a copy for themselves and use it for advertising, etc?

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