Before Google launched its own version of an augmented reality (AR) translator called “Google Lens,” the company used its smartphone cameras to translate text into different languages. Now, Google has replaced its existing translation app with Google Lens.
Real World Copy and Paste
Besides visual search which has various shopping, objects, and landmarks identification uses, Google Lens is good for lifting text for real-life copy and pasting.
Text capabilities go together with the Translate filters that let you overlay your translations over the foreign texts in the scenes to better retain context. You can also use these features even when you’re not connected to the internet.
Mobile Apps The Google Translate mobile apps have long offered a camera tool that was last revamped in 2019 with auto-detect and support for more languages. The Android app’s broader Material You redesign modernized the UI last year.
Lens UI
Given the overlap between some of the features available through the Google Translate app, Google has replaced its own translation feature with an interface from Lens.
What You Can Do?
On Android, this opens up the camera lens so you can take photos directly into the app. On iOS, there is now an option for the user to select which type of Lens they want to use (e.g., translation).
You can manually switch between different languages, toggle on/off clash mode, and “show original text” at the top, while you can import screenshots from your device into the app from the bottom left.
This update has been available for some time now in Google Translate for both Android and iOS.
Major Advancements in AI
This consolidation makes perfect business and financial sense and comes before AR Translate, which uses “major advances in artificial intelligence” to overlay translated text onto an image.
Let us know if you’ll be using it in the future.