A prototype version of Google Goggles was demonstrated by Google’s Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt at MWC 2010 in Barcelona, Spain. Google Goggles is a visual search application developed for Android 1.6 and above smartphones that allows mobile users to snap a digital picture and have Google return related search results based upon the image.
The new feature being developed no longer returns just related searches, but is able to recognize foreign words in the image and subsequently translate them although for the prototype, this is limited to just German to English translation.
The prototype works by making use of Google’s machine translation and image recognition services. More specifically, “on the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.”
There’s no indication as to when Google may release this new product but by the time the service does launch, Google hopes to offer image to text translation for each of the 52 languages currently supported through Google Translate.
Once this service is fully implemented, it will simply enhance the entire experience of traveling abroad as you will be able to translate a sign, poster or any item that contains foreign language text.
