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Google Lens is moving into the camera app and gaining new features

Google Lens is moving into the camera app and gaining new features

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Google has come out with a new version of Google Lens in beta, the company announced at its annual developer conference today. The new version will be built inside the camera app, instead of Google Photos, and will roll out over the next few weeks.

As part of the latest update, Google Lens is going to be built into 10 different Android devices’ native cameras, including Google Pixel 2 and LG 7 ThinQ devices, so you don’t have to open a separate app. There will also be a real-time finder that will analyze what your camera sees even before you press click. If you point your camera at a poster of a musician, Lens can also start playing a music video.

You open up any camera app, and Google Lens will tell you what’s in the image. The image recognition tool can give users more information about things like books, buildings, and works of art. How it works is that you take a photo, and the tool will process the pixels through machine learning to provide more details and also provide relevant search tags.

Google has more of an eye on retail with this new update to Lens: instead of just identifying clothes, it will also provide you with shopping links on occasion, if it recognizes the brand or style. Lens can also recognize words now, so you can copy and paste from the real world into your phone, which is a similar functionality that Google Translate Image already has.

There’s also a crossover between Google Lens and Maps this time around, which will add AR to Street View and help you navigate in real time.

The 10 Android devices that are getting Google Lens inside their camera apps are: LGE, Motorola, Xiaomi, Sony Mobile, HMD/Nokia, Transsion, TCL, OnePlus, BQ, Asus, and the Google Pixel.