Google Goggles has finally made its way to the iPhone, almost a year after Android users first got in on the photo tagging fun.
Goggles lets you search for things using your camera, instead of text, or your voice. For example, point it at a book cover and you will get links to buy the book, read reviews or info – all the usual stuff you’d get if you typed the book title into the search engine.
But Goggles goes one step further than that, allowing you to search buildings and the like, as Google’s image recognition tech will be able to recognise some places, due to the amount of similar pictures that have already been taken and tagged.
Google is keen to point out that Goggles is still a work in progress however, and warns you not to expect 100 per cent accuracy just yet.
“Computer vision is a hard problem and Google Goggles is still a Labs product”, said Milan Broum, software engineer on Google Mobile Team.
“It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games. However, it doesn’t yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food”.
Speaking of food, Pocket-lint would like to pre-warn Goggle testers to expect the unexpected if they try and search from a picture of a pizza. The results were anything but a pizza. One in particular was highly inappropriate. Maybe it got confused by the peperami….
Goggles isn’t a brand new app, it is simply an update to the existing Google Mobile App, so if you’ve already got that installed on your phone, simply visit the App Store for a free update.
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