Google I/O 2019: Google Lens on Google Go will now let you translate signs on the move

May 8, 2019, 01:03 IST

Aparna Chennapragada, Vice President at Google, announces Google Go's new camera capability at the company's annual developer conference, Google I/O 2019YouTube/Google I/O 2019 live stream

Google Go’s new camera capability — using Google Lens — will now allow users to translate signs by simply pointing a camera at them.
Google Go’s camera feature can read the sign out as well as translate the text within the image into more than 12 languages.
The company has announced that the feature will be live on Google Go before the end of the month.

Google announced a new camera capability that they're introducing to Google Go during the company's annual developer conference, Google I/O 2019.

Using their landmark Google Lens technology in cohesion with Google Go, users will now be able to translate signs and billboards by simply pointing a camera at them.

What you’re seeing here is text-to-speech, computer vision, the power of translate and 20 years of language understanding from search — all coming together.

Aparna Chennapragada, Vice President at Google

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Not only is this useful for the 800 million adults who struggle to read the words that they come across in their daily lives, it’s also useful for 75 million Indians that come online for the very first time every year according to a report by Kantar IMRB.

Google Go is Google’s variant of Search for entry level devices. According to Aparna Chennapragada, Google’s vice president, all you have to do is open Google Lens directly from the search bar and then point at the respective sign.

We want to make this feature accessible to as many people as possible, so it already in more than a dozen languages. And the teams worked incredibly hard to compress all this tech to just over a 100KB.

Aparna Chennapragada, Vice President at Google

The phone will automatically read the words on the sign out loud while highlighting them on the image simultaneously.

And, in case you don’t understand the language at all, you can translate the text in the image into your own local language. The translated text will directly overlay the original text in the image. So, the sign will essentially look like it was written in your local language to begin with.

Should you choose, you can have the text read out loud in your local language as well once been translated in the image.