I believe you’re familiar with Google Lens, Google’s powerful AI search tool. Well, it’s now become an integral part of every image search you make. From now on, you can access all of the cool Google Lens features straight from your browser, including images, translations, finding text, and more.
Rajan Patel, a vice president of engineering at Google, confirmed the change on Twitter. “The google homepage doesn’t change often, but today it did,” Patel writes. “We’re always working to expand the kinds of questions you can ask and improving how we answer them. Now you can ask visual questions easily from your desktop.”
The change is already visible and available for everyone and I quickly tested it out. When I used a stock image of a drone I had on my computer, I got results similar to using the “regular” Google image search.
But then I tried the cover image for an article I wrote earlier today, and I discovered that you can select the text in the image and search for it, or translate it and search for the results in the target language. How exciting!
Google Lens was introduced in 2017 and it’s capable of doing tons of cool stuff. For example, it can identify your pets in photos, solve math problems; and copy, paste, and translate even handwritten text. I personally use it at art exhibitions to scan photos I particularly like and find more information about them. I also use it to translate user manuals from languages that I don’t understand. Not that I follow the manual even then… but that’s another story. [via TechCrunch]
