Google's Goggles app gets translation abilities

One of Google’s most talked about Android apps, Goggles, has been given a significant upgrade that now allows its users to translate foreign languages using their handset’s camera.

Point your Android phone at any piece of text in either English, French, Italian, Spanish or German, highlight the words you want translated, and the app will translate it into one of numerous languages. Google are also currently working on making the app recognise other Latin-based languages, as well as those not written in a Latin script.

Other improvements to the app include better barcode recognition, a more intuitve UI, the ability to scan locally stored images and the ability to recognise more products and logos.

Google’s blog post about the the improvements states that, “Computer vision is a hard problem. While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize. The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search”.

The update to Goggles is currently available to any Android owner running version 1.6 or above of the operating system. Sorry HTC Hero owners, that, for the time being at least, rules you out.