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Google Lens is coming to desktop Chrome, will soon handle text+image search
Google Lens, Google's computer vision search engine, is coming to desktop Chrome. Google didn't exactly share a timeline, but a teaser tweet showed what the feature will look like.
On desktop Chrome, you'll soon be able to right-click an image and pick "Search with Google Lens," which will dim the page and bring up a clipping tool so you can throw a certain image to Google's photo AI. After a round-trip to the Internet, a sidebar will pop up showing several results.
While Google.com's image search just tries to find similar pictures, Lens can actually identify things in a picture, like people, text, math equations, animals, landmarks, products, and more. It can translate text through the camera and even copy text from the real world (with OCR) and paste it into an app. The feature has existed on Android and iOS for a while, first as a camera-driven search that brought up a live viewfinder, then in Google Photos, and more recently as a long-press option for web pictures in Chrome for Android.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @09:56PM (1 child)
must grudgingly admit that "google lense" is "da shit".
had a solarpanel with a backside label that got the V-short and V-mpp values mixed up.
fortunately there was a tiny barcode under the front glass (no numbers, just lines, barcode).
pointing the " google lense" app on the phone at it revealed the real manufacturer (now in business nirvana) and the correct spec pdf.
also it can translate really good, like ingredients lable on cans or such made in foreign country.
seems like a good use for A.I.
now if we could only get the back-end A.I. "in-house", like maybe a nvidia jetson with a opensource OS and a proxy thru tor to the google database (the search engine), that " lense" wouldn't have to leave so much personal data on the google ...in my case, "user with unique sim-slot ID 12345 is not too smart and a cheapshot buying rebranded not-up-to-spec solar modules and doesn't speak chinese and might to cook chinese dishes himself :)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 04 2021, @10:23PM
Apple iOS can do real-time translation [apple.com], offline, presumably using the Neural Engine [wikipedia.org]. I don't know if that extends to text seen by the camera. You might have to download some languages, but 128 GB is becoming the new minimum storage spec.
Lots of Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek, etc. chips include machine learning accelerators now. But you still might want to use your Jetson Xavier NX or whatever to hide the origin of queries, if you can.
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