GOOGLE LENS ROLLING FOR ANDROID SOON 😘

The Google Lens roll-out has been really slow and the limited number of officially available devices makes it even worse. An old feature called Google Goggles was popular in the early days of Android, but Lens was announced as a better version at Google I/O 2017. The goal of Google Lens is to leverage the company’s massive machine learning platform to try and predict what you’re pointing the camera at. It was initially released as a preview build and began rolling out to a select number of Pixel devices. However, we just recently noticed on Twitter that the Google Photos team announced a wider rollout to supported devices.

We previously covered how to force the feature so the community could get their hands on it early, but this loophole was quickly blocked by Google. You’ll find an example list of what we can do with Google Lens below.

Can identify:

ArtworkBarcodesBooksBuildingsLandmarksMedia coversMoviesMusic albumsPaintingsPlacesPoints of InterestStatuesVideo games

Can perform:

Add contacts from a business cardLanguage translationLook up product informationOpen web addresses in your browserPlant and animal identificationSave dates to your calendar from a poster

It makes sense that Google wanted to keep this feature in a preview state with limited devices. It was not as polished as they’d like for a wider roll-out around the world. In October of last year, it was brought to the Pixel 2 in both Assistant as well as Google Photos. We then showed another way to get Google Lens working in Google Assistant as long as you had root access. Again the change was brought to the attention of the Mountain View tech giant who disable the methodwe discovered.