14 DAY TRIAL // Mountain View-based Internet giant Google has just announced a series of enhancements brought to its Google Goggles application / service, which is now available for download in version 1.5 from the Android Market.
The new flavor of Google Goggles brings support for Russian optical character recognition (OCR) and translation, along with a map view of Search History, and copy and paste capabilities.
At the same time, the company notes that Google Goggles 1.5 brings a series of modifications to the results interface, which should make it easier for users to view and navigate through their results.
Optical character recognition (OCR) and translation of Russian in Google Goggles was already available for some lucky ones since the company announced it at the Inside Search event, and now is went official.
“Since Google Goggles first launched in 2009, it has been able to recognize and translate text in a number of different languages, as long as the language used Latin characters. With the launch of OCR for Russian, Goggles is now able to read Cyrillic characters,” Google notes.
“Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text and allow you to translate the text into one of over 40 other languages. Russian OCR is also available for users of Google Goggles on the Google Search app for iOS. Очень полезно!”
Another change Google Goggles comes with is a Map view of one's search history.
When enabled, the history includes a list of all the images a user has searched for, along with details on the place where the photo was taken, provided that users chose to share this info with Google.
“We’ve added a map view, which shows your Goggles image search history on a map so you can quickly zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location,” Google explains.
Users will also have the possibility to toggle between the map view and the list of locations where photos were taken, through the button in the upper right.
The new version of Goggles also brings the possibility to copy recognized text to the phone’s clipboard, so that users can paste it into various applications.
The Google Goggles 1.5 is available for download now from the Android Market here.
