14 DAY TRIAL // As previously announced, Google has introduced its visual search technology Goggles to the iPhone and iPod Touch. iOS users can now access the same features that Android owners have enjoyed for almost a year.
"Today, we’re excited to announce that Goggles is now a feature of Google Mobile App for iPhone," Google announced.
"In the new version of Google Mobile App just tap on the camera button to search using Goggles. Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes -- just click on them to find out more," it added.
Goggles is now included in the Google Mobile App available in the App Store. It's only enabled in the English language version for now and only works on devices running iOS 4. You can read more about it here.
The new feature works just like the Android version, point your phone's camera at something, take a snapshot, and, hopefully, Google will provide information on whatever it is you're looking at.
Of course, the feature comes with the same limitation as it does on Google's own platform. Many of the objects are not recognized and Goggles works best for a handful of types of searches.
Google Goggles is one of the most ambitious search projects at the search giant, but it's also one of the most difficult.
Computer vision is now in its infancy and algorithms fail more often than not to recognize the objects in the photos.
It is constantly getting better, though. One of the more interesting applications of the tool, which was introduced earlier this year, is the possibility to translate written text, very useful when you're in a foreign country.
Text is relatively easy to recognize and Google has plenty of experience with OCR systems from its Books project. Of course, Google Translate is one of the best machine translation tools at the moment, so pairing all of these technologies made a lot of sense.
Other objects, such as animals, plants or food, are much harder for the technology to recognize.
Google's plan was always to bring Goggles to more platforms and the popularity of the iPhone made it an obvious target. Still, even with the wide release, Goggles is still considered experimental and it may be a while before the results can elevate it above fun gimmick and make it a truly useful tool.