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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: 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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