Google Lens is the artificial intelligence-powered camera tool that can recognize the items that it can see. A preliminary version of this feature was launched last year on Photos and Google Assistant. At that point in time, it could only recognize around 250,000 items. The company has revealed today that Lens can now recognize more than one billion items. A redesigned Lens experienced was launched across iOS and Android just last week, the feature was brought to iOS users through the Google app.
This has been made possible by training the feature’s optical character recognition engine on reading more product labels. With Lens being able to recognize text, it can thus identify more products by putting names to their faces.
The optical character recognition engine has also leveraged data from photos taken by smartphones so as to increase the feature’s reliability. Even though the one billion figure sounds impressive, it has a limitation. They’re the items that are available through Google Shopping. This means that the feature may have trouble recognizing obscure items.
That being said, one billion is still a huge number, so it would most likely have a relevant result to show when a user relies on Google Lens to find out more about something that catches their interest.