Google's "Lens" App Gets A Huge Upgrade

Google Lens was launched last year. It was initially able to recognize a quarter of a million items. This may sound like a lot, but Google Lens is meant to be something that can give you information on anything that crosses your path, at least in terms of what Google is expecting its pet project to eventually become. It seems like the search engine giant has gotten its new product very far indeed in just one short year. This is because of the fact that Google Lens can now recognize a whopping billion different items.

One of the biggest reasons that Google Lens has gotten exponentially better is because of the fact that Google has improved its optical character recognition. A lot of data has also been fed into the software that governs this Google product. This data has come from pictures taken by smartphones, so it helps the hardware understand more vaguely defined things that it may not already have on its database by comparing it to similar things that it is already aware of.

"Lens can now identify more than one billion products—four times the number it covered at launch.", announced Aparna Chennapragada, VP, Google Lens and AR, in a blog post.

One thing that should be noted is that most of the items that were added came from the Google Shopping platform. Hence, if something is not already on there, chances are that Google Lens might not be able to recognize it. This also restricts Google Lens from working properly in areas where Google is not already widely used such as China.

That being said, Google Lens is becoming very powerful indeed, so much so that it is almost scary. The application is already smart enough to recognize people. It can also make life a lot easier because it can intuitively perform tasks that you would have had to do yourself otherwise, such as connecting to WiFi just by reading a router label.