Many of you may know about Google’s Goggles app that’s available on the Play Store, and has been for quite some time. It essentially lets you take a picture of something and Google will then search the web for it. So if you take a picture of an item you want to buy, the app will search and tell you the price of the product. It’s a pretty useful feature, and one that might be seeing a big update in the near future, as word on the street is that engineers in Mountain View are working on a way to expand the functionality of Goggles, and have it as part of the Camera app, without needing another app.
With this report, there was also an image depicting how this would work. In the picture, you take a picture of a coffee mug and a tape roll. The app finds out what kind of coffee mug that is and tells you the name as well as the price and where it can be bought. Making it seem pretty seamless. As we’ve stated before, this feature isn’t actually new as Google Goggles has been out for quite some time, but what is new is the fact that it may be built into an upcoming update to the Android Camera.
The Android Camera was rebuilt recently, by Google and released in the Google Play Store. So that it can be used on any Android smartphone, and Google can also update it without needing to push out an update to the operating system. This might be something we see at Google I/O in May, but it could also be something that Google drops in our laps on a random Wednesday afternoon, similar to what happened when the Android N Developer Preview was announced. Google is always looking for ways to expand the camera and make it more useful for more people, and this might just be the way that they are planning to do it. We’ll have to wait and see how well it actually works though. In the meantime, we’ll have to keep playing around with Google Goggles.