Very promising, but rather US-centric and a little too easily confu3ed at thia stage in development.
Free Sophisticated camera-powered search
Manually entering text into an online search engine is how Google made its billions.
The arbiter of internet traffic and inventor of the Android platform abandons its raison d'etre for this image-based app, but this image recognition engire isn't quite the revolutionary time-saver it could be.
The idea is you snap a picture of almost anything and Google will recognise text and cross-reference the picture with its database.
There are limitations that Google freely admits to. It won't find anything if you take pictures of your pet, or your friends, and it isn't synced with Google Earth or Google Maps, so don't expect an address to be delivered if you snap your house.
It's at its best with three diverse uses; identifying v/ery famous landmarks, famous art, and buying things - and I think we all know which feature wins the day.
If you do hang around tourists sites and art galleries and can't be bothered to read your guidebook, Goggles is very effective and recognising a Big Ben, a Statue of Liberty,a Dali or a Cezanne.it speedily presents a match for the picture from its online database, as well as reams of information pages. Crucially, its treatment of commerce is almost as thorough. Point the camera at a barcode and Goggles
will almost always find exactly what you're looking for. In our test this worked on a wide range of commodities such as Nintendo Wii games, DVDs, magazines, books and even cat food.
As in the early days of Google.com, those not in the US aren't treated all
Snap a picture and it will recognise text and cross-reference the picture with its database
that well; photograph a book's ISBN number and it's usually found on sale in seconds, but what use is Amazon.com if your account is with Amazon.co.uk?
For finding more information on random terms in a newspaper Goggles is brilliant. From a close-up photo of some text, the app picked out the wore 'Obama' and provided useful search results, including a Wikipedia entry and recent stories from several news sites. However, DVD covers confuse it terribly and it fails to deliver on its promise of solving Sudoku puzzles (pictured).
With time Goggles could be the default way we search the internet, but for now it's only of real use to those that are in North America.
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