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Google Turns Pixel 4 into a Translator, Copier and PDF Generator
November 18, 2019 Google continues to release Pixel 4 info on new features like Screen Attention, Pixel Themes, car crash detection, and more that were never announced but can be found on the latest Pixel smartphones. There’s one feature in particular that hasn’t got much attention: improved Google Lens suggestions in the Google Camera app. For context, Google Lens is a tool that uses computer vision to analyze what you’re looking at. It was announced at Google I/O 2017 with features like the ability to identify what kind of flower is appearing, or pulling up information on a restaurant on the camera, or recognize Wi-Fi network entry credentials. Since its debut, Google Lens has received updates to suggest outfits, recognize works from local artists, scan restaurant menus, overlay translated text, and do other cool things. On the Pixel smartphones, the Google Camera app has a dedicated shortcut to launch Google Lens. Starting with the Pixel 3, Google Lens runs in real-time in the Google Camera viewfinder. This integration, called Google Lens suggestions, allows the Google Camera app to detect URLs, email addresses, and business cards. With the new Pixel 4, Google Lens suggestions can also offer to scan documents, translate text, or copy text. Hover the phone over something that looks like it might be a document, a chip appears on the Google Lens icon and “scan document” text. Tapping on this opens Google Lens with the corners automatically set to crop the document and it can be shared as a PDF or image. The translation feature, supports English, Spanish, German, Hindi, and Japanese at the moment. Figure 1: Google Pixel 4 Apps |
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Source: xda
Google Lens offering to scan a document Google Camera offering to translate German text from WinFuture.de
Figure 2: Google Text Translation in Pixel 4
Figure 2: Google Text Translation in Pixel 4
Source: xda
These improved Lens suggestions don’t seem to be available on older Pixel smartphones. When the feature debuted on the Pixel 3, Google said it used the Pixel Visual Core to offer real-time suggestions. It’s possible these new suggestions rely on the upgraded Pixel Neural Core on the Pixel 4. In any case, we’re sure the talented Google Camera modding community will come up with a way to force this feature to work on older Pixel smartphones, possibly by offloading the suggestions to the main SoC.
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Barry Young
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