Google announced the launch of a new Google Docs for Android app. Read the official Google announcement here. The most exciting feature in this new app: the ability to take photos and convert the image to text. Or in the words of the Google blog:
And my favorite feature: Using the app and your phone’s camera, you can turn photos with text into editable Google documents with the power of optical character recognition (OCR). Just create a new ‘Document from Photo’ or select the camera icon from the widget, and your converted document will appear in your documents list shortly after you snap the picture. You can also convert photos already stored on your phone by sharing them with the Google Docs app. OCR does a pretty good job capturing unformatted text in English but won’t recognize handwriting or some fonts – stay tuned, it will get better over time!
Now since Google Docs can translate documents, users will be able to take a photo of a road sign or a restaurant menu and translate it into another language. That’s a great feature for travelers to foreign countries. Word Lens, a company I have blogged about a few times already, has an augmented reality iPhone app which translates images to text.
