Google Goggles, the self-referential app for scanning just about anything, sees its latest major release today. The official Google Mobile blog has all the saucy details on version 1.7. The big new feature is continuous scanning, i.e., getting your barcode or QR code results instantly without taking a photo first. It’s essentially extracting the relevant information straight out of a video feed from your smartphone’s camera sensor – neat.
Also included is a richer text recognition feature. You can now instantly search a big clump of text, say a magazine article snippit, and find an online version to easily share a link. I imagine it could be very useful for students, saving just relevant parts of a textbook like a formula or short biography and leaving the heavy dead tree format in the drawer. Nothing groundbreaking, but incremental updates are always welcome.
User-supplied results will also be getting more emphasis when searching via Goggles. Combine this with a slightly updated UI (along the lines of the latest Google+ app revision) and you’ve got a nice housecleaning update. Goggles is still one of the most versatile scanning apps in the Market, if not the fastest; well worth your download if you need surprisingly accurate text scanning and barcode reading to boot. Download it in the Android Market now.
