Google's Goggles headed to iPhones this year
Google's search-by-sight product, which up until now has been an exclusive to Android, is said to still be coming to the iPhone, and as soon as this year.
Good news for iPhone users who had lusted over the Android-only app Goggles from Google. It's set to hit the App Store sometime in the next three months.
A report by The Register, which was covering the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Monday, makes note of Google staff engineer David Petrou's keynote, wherein Petrou said the application was, in fact, still in the works. Better yet: pending Apple's approval, it's scheduled for release by the end of 2010.
Goggles was unveiled by Google last December as a way for users to search the Web using the camera on their mobile phone. It was later added as a built-in application in the company's Android mobile operating system.
When a user takes a photo within the app, it's sent to Google, where it's cross-referenced with a database of billions of images. Google then returns search results for that item--that is, if it can find a match.
A demo of Goggles working on a book title.
(Credit: Google)The Goggles application can scan books, album covers, product logos, locations, and works of art. In May, the company also added integration with its translation tool Google Translate to let users instantly translate scanned text into other languages, which we found to work reasonably well.
Besides Android, Google had confirmed late last year that it was planning to bring the application to other platforms, including the iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry, but has not offered any updates since. Additionally, Google had ambitions of bringing Goggles to the desktop in the form of a browser extension, though that has yet to be released.
