Google is trying to help you when you’re traveling, as the 1.1 version of Google Goggles offers the ability to translate languages.
Let’s say you don’t understand the menu at a restaurant, you can whip out your smartphone and then take a picture of it. You then single out the words you want to understand and, if Goggles recognizes it, it will be able to translate the text. Right now, Goggles can recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish but Google is working hard to get more languages in.
The updated visual search app also includes “improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, an improved user interface, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery.” The better artwork recognition is probably thanks to the acquisition of Plink and check out the video below for a quick example of what Google Goggles can do.
[Via Google Mobile blog]