Now that smartphones are getting even smarter, it's common to use their built in features for more than one purpose. Before when your phone had a camera, it was just meant for taking pictures. Now they can be used as scanners for barcodes and also to identify items so you can get more information about them online.
Google Goggles allows you to take pictures of items with your camera and then use your phone or tablet to search the internet to find out more information about that item. You can even load previously taken pictures from your device to be analyzed by Google Goggles.
In our testing we have noticed that it works pretty well on items with text on them such as the name brand or model number that Goggles can read and search for online. It also does a good job of reading bar codes and matching it with the product in its search results. Some of the things that you can search for with Google Goggles include DVDs, barcodes, logos, art, text, books and well known landmarks. Goggles can translate words in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese and Russian.
To use the app all you need to do is open it and point it at the object you want to search for. It will then take a picture and analyze it to see if it can figure out what it is and give you more information about it.
In this example Goggles was able to find the actual product itself as well as read the text off the item. Tapping on the item description will do a Google search for that item and tapping on the text will do a search for the text itself.
As you can see in this example it was not able to find any information about the bottle based on its image itself. It does show what it thinks are similar images but in this case they aren't similar at all.
Here is an example of a bar code scan where it took the information of the bar code to determine what the product was.
Other things you can do within the app are turn on the flash to stay constantly on to give you more light to get a better picture of the object you are trying to scan. You can also crop the object to avoid getting anything else in the picture that you don't want scanned. Going to the Google Goggles options will let you set things like save the images of the things you scanned to your SD card so you can look at them later as well as keeping a search history of previous scans in case you need to refer back to one of them. Google Goggles can be downloaded for free from the Android Market.
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