During the 2010 Mobile World Congress Google showed off a prototype of Google Goggles that would capture text written in German and then translate it to English. Using optical character recognition (OCR), combined with a translation service that lived in the cloud, Google essentially enabled you to translate signs, labels, and documents you interacted with in the real world using nothing but your smartphone. Let the awesomeness of that settle in for a moment … right, off to today’s announcement: With time Google has been adding more and more languages to Goggles, and today they’re happy to announce that they can now recognize Russian, meaning they can finally understand Cyrillic.
Not stopping there, the latest version of Goggles, which by the way only works on Android and iOS, will show you your search queries on a map. This is useful if you’re an avid Goggles user and have a long history of searches you don’t want to query to find a particle item you scanned, instead you can zoom in on that electronics store in your local neighborhood that you recently visited and see all the barcodes you looked up while doing some research on your next stereo receiver. Google has also made it easier to store whatever information you scanned into the phone’s clipboard, letting you paste your scanned content wherever you see fit.
Will other companies ever be able to catch up to Goggles? Microsoft has “Bing Vision”, but that only works on Windows Phone, and right now that operating system has a smaller market share than Windows Mobile of all things. That’ll change once Nokia starts pumping out Windows Phones, but it’s going to be more than half a year until that happens. We can’t really think of anyone else doing visual search, do you know any companies we should look up?