Google Lens
Point your camera or an image at anything and search it
Google Lens is a set of vision-based computing capabilities that understand what you are looking at and turn it into a search: copy or translate text, identify plants and animals, explore locales or menus, discover products, and find visually similar images. Lens compares objects in a picture to other images and ranks them by similarity and relevance, and can also return web results, Shopping results, or a Google Search results page for a recognised barcode, product name or book title. It is reached through the Google app, Google Camera, Google Photos, Chrome and Google Images rather than as a standalone application.
Primary Functions
visual search
translation
text recognition
object identification
shopping
Features
- Search using your camera, a photo, or almost any image to surface visually similar images and related content from across the web
- Copy and translate text in real time from over 100 languages, then paste it on your phone or on a computer with Chrome
- Step-by-step homework help with explainers, videos and web results for math, history, chemistry, biology and physics
- Identify plants and animals from a picture
- Shopping discovery for clothes, furniture and home decor without typing a description
- Available across the Google app, Google Camera, Google Photos, Chrome and Google Images, and the camera app of select Android devices
- Optional location use for more accurate identification of places and landmarks
Limitations
- Shopping results are available only in a fixed list of countries (Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, United Kingdom, United States)
- Results are probabilistic and Lens may collapse ranked possibilities into one answer: Google's own example is a dog judged probably 95% German shepherd and 5% corgi being shown only as a German shepherd
- Lens identifies and filters explicit results using Google SafeSearch guidelines, so some legitimate visual queries can be suppressed
- No developer API is published on lens.google - Lens is only reachable inside Google's own surfaces, and on Android its camera-app integration is limited to 'select Android devices'
- Place and landmark accuracy depends on granting Lens access to your location