Gadgetory

hey everybody its joel from pocketnow.com today i'm gonna revisit an app that's been out for a little while it's called Google Goggles Google Goggles is a really hard program to pronounce when you say it really fast and I'm probably going to screw it up a few times so forgive me in advance but what it lets you do is it harnesses the power of Google to search stuff using your phone's camera so there's lots of cool stuff that it can do can search for books it can search logos it can search barcodes it can even scan business cards and contact information and allow you to import them right into your phone so it's really cool but they just introduced something else and that's a Translate module so I'm gonna hurry and show you just a brief overview of a whole bunch of stuff that it can do and then we're going to jump right into translate so let's go take a look okay this is a Nexus One running Android 2.2 but goggles will work on any Android device running Android 1.6 and above the icon looks like a pair of 3d glasses with the word goggles underneath it well tap that and the first thing that you'll notice is it's basically just a camera app but it is GPS enabled GPS is turned on by default if you can see a little GPS icon down in the corner so because this is a camera app it stands to reason that you can scan stuff like barcodes with the camera so we'll go ahead and do that it auto focuses takes the picture and then runs through and does a recognition in this case it says that it's scanned a barcode and it came up with Firefly the complete series yadda yadda yadda it's got some web search results gives you a link to compare prices at Google Product Search does some text matches and even shows you the picture that it took and lets you just come down here and type in a search phrase if that wasn't at all what you wanted so that's kind of cool it can also do more complex barcodes like I showed you in my QR code video this can scan QR codes as long as I can find the QR code in the viewfinder I'm going to take that picture it'll autofocus and recognize and you can see there it found a URL that's tappa below and in fact that's the right URL if we tap that it's going to go ahead and launch the web browser and put that right there into your browser so pretty neat let's go and see what else goggles can do so barcodes are cool but let's say back to Firefly let's see we don't have a barcode here the barcode is damaged or missing that's a problem so goggles want you to do something really neat and that is we're just gonna come in here and take a picture of the cover and I'm not even going to get all of the cover just some of it and if we look it's doing its recognition and lo and behold it found that this is the same thing that it found what it was doing the barcode search has the same set of results has some similar results and there's the picture that we took so that's really cool let's see what other stuff it can do this is a book by Margaret Wiese called ghost Legion it's the 4th book in her start of the Guardians trilogy don't ask me how phors and 3 but anyway we're gonna do the same thing here take a picture and it scans through all that and this time it didn't find anything we're gonna try one more time and then move on we'll get a little bit more of the book here and it's going through and scanning that again and this time it got it this is ghost Legion can print compare prices on it we can even preview that book at Google Book Search so we'll go ahead and do that it loads up books.google.com has a book review has user ratings lots of cool stuff about the book so let's get back one of the things that Google Goggles does is logo recognition so I've got a empty bottle of Vicks nyquil cough let's scan that see what we come up with this is really hard to hold the camera and take pictures like this so bear with me so there's the picture and there's the scanning and it found a logo in this case nyquil so it didn't figure out that that was my quill cold and cough but it did find the Vicks nyquil logo and it gives us some web results that help out with that now if we wanted to find the exact product we could always come over here and scan the barcode and see what results that gave us and it did pretty good it says this is an antihistamine cough suppressant cherry-flavored 10 ounces and sure enough this is a histamine cough suppressant analysis so perfect recognition there this is something more complicated it's a business card you may have seen these if you do any kind of business people like to hand them out has their contact information on them but what it doesn't have is a quick and easy way to get that information into your phone so this is real-world stuff guys so if you show up at my house make sure you have a pizza some mountain dew something like that if you call me go ahead and leave a constructive message you may all do the same thing be nice so we'll put that in our viewfinder and we'll take a picture and see how it does and right there it found my address it found my title it found my name and it's asking me if I want to add it to contacts which one touch I can go ahead and do that so that's great if it were in a different language I could even translate that and then it gives me some web results which are all very relevant the first two results are my website the next one is actually a link to me that somebody else has put up there so that's kind of cool and then of course I've gotten the picture if I need to refer to it and don't have that business card anymore so really really neat but this Translate thing is kind of interesting so let's take a look at that what I've got here is a French textbook and this textbook has French in it and I can't speak French I can't read French I know that French is a language that they speak somewhere in a country near Spain but what I want to do is I can't get the text that I want that's that's this text right here in the frame without messing up so I'm gonna use this other feature which is the crop tool which I don't like the way they implement it because you have to crop on your viewfinder not on the taken picture so that's kind of awkward as you can see but you can highlight basically what you want it to take a picture of and it'll only scan that which makes your scans faster and more accurate it just have to make sure you keep it in the right orientation so we'll go ahead and do that it's taking that picture and it's scanning through right now and in this case I've found a bird book not what I wanted and not the result that I got when I tested this out so let's try again again this is just the text and in this case it got the text so great let's go ahead and translate that it automatically detects that it was in French and it tells me that this says in the fall we play football in winter it's cold it rains a lot in the spring it goes to the beach in the summer ok great I don't know if that's what that says or not maybe one of my French viewers can help me translate that more accurately and see if it did a pretty good job but as far as I can tell since this picture up here talks about looks like the beach it looks like there's a park and football which in America we call this soccer and then skiing over here it looks like that is contextually relevant and and pretty good so if I were and France and needed to find out what a sign said I could use my Google phone running Android and Google Goggles to quickly take a picture of that and scan it in and translate it now I've even seen some times where some translations have a speak option I think that's more on the web side but I think that's coming over to this app sometime soon so keep your fingers crossed but how cool would that be if you could see something that you didn't know what it said take a picture of it and have it speak it back to you in the native language and then in the translated language as well so really we're just one step closer to to living in a Star Trek universe here with a universal translator in this case and of course that would be your pad but all kinds of cool stuff what kind of stuff have you scanned using Google Goggles again let me get back here and show you this is it neat is it lame is it a pain do you like to use it have you ever dropped your phone when you're doing that that crop tool I'd like to know there's one other feature that I haven't showed you here and that's the little what sneer made geo pin I'm gonna do an entirely separate video about that we'll do it outside on location but go ahead and give Google Goggles a try and let know how your searches turn out you can see in this video we were about 8090 percent accurate but I want to know about you is it any better for you or is it just kind of lame is it a tool that you'd use all the time or is it something you'd install and then throw away let me know in the comments then talking about Google Goggles I am Joe for pocketnow.com