Language Trainers Blog

In a previous post I extolled the virtues of Google’s visual search feature built into Android smartphones – Google Goggles. The idea is that instead of going through the effort of typing to search for something, you can simply snap a photo of it with your built-in phone camera, and upload it straight to Google, who do the rest of the work for you. Want to know what a painting is? Just take a photo of it and Google Goggles does the rest.

Recently Google also built in a translation feature, allowing you to take a photo of a foreign text – be it a book, a menu, anything – and in combination with Google Translate, Goggles can provide an instant (machine) translation. I was excited over this development, because it seemed like the first steps of something similar to Douglas Adams’ Babelfish from his genius Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books.

Apple users can now rejoice, as Google Goggles has recently hit the iPhone, via the Google app. You can grab it from the iTunes store here.