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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18149120/google-lens-ai-camera-recognize-detect-1-billion-items
Google's AI-powered camera tool can now recognize over a billion items, the company wrote in a new blog post. Google Lens launched last year in a preliminary version on Photos and Assistant with only around 250,000 items within its repertoire.
The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens' optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before.
The 1 billion items figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely doesn't include more obscure, unshoppable objects, such as a gaming console from the 1990s or the first edition of a rare book. But it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who's simply just looking up an item they're curious about.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 21 2018, @10:28PM (2 children)
This is why smartglasses or AR/VR headsets should have front-facing cameras. You should be able to point your device at anything and get info about it. Point it at any flower or plant, get the EOL [eol.org] or Wikipedia entry. Point it at a math problem, and it plugs it into Wolfram Alpha and displays the result on-screen. In this case they seem to have focused on products. I often take pictures of book covers so I can look them up later. You could imagine an app like this bringing up a blurb for the book, star rating, etc. You click something to save it to a list. Then you go home and pirate the ebook instead of buying it on Google Shopping.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday December 21 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
I take photos of grocery products that turn out to be particularly good. My favorite variety of pickles, my favorite frozen pizza, that sort of thing. Then, when we (the SO and/or I) go shopping, we don't have to have our heads cluttered up with brands and varieties or be calling home to one another, we just look in the appropriate gallery in the phone, go "ah yes, these are the ones" and chuck them in the cart.
I've been doing this ever since phones could take pictures and store them in reasonable numbers. Lately, as I get older, it's become even handier, because my neurons seem to be falling over in larger and larger groups. Lazy bastards. 😊
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24 2018, @12:44AM
I do the same. Super handy when the store stops stocking my favorite *. At least I have a picture of * and can then remember what it was.