Google Goggles is an interesting app but one that I have not found much use for, or have not got it to work sufficiently well. For one, I have installed and uninstalled this app at least 5 times as I have always heard something nice that it can do, but have never got it to work as expected.
Some of the features that are there in this app can be had by just installing a few other apps individually. For example, Google Goggles has a barcode scanner that is horrendously useless. Firstly, you have to take a photo of the barcode with a steady hand making sure that no other text or graphic in the scene can be deciphered by Goggles. The photo is then transmitted to the Google servers and after a while it send back data on what it has interpreted.
Barcode Scanner is a much better app that analyzes barcodes (and barcodes only) in real time.
Goggles otherwise can be used to take photos and analyze them in multiple ways. For example, take a photo of an object and Google will try to identify what it is and return relevant search results. But half or more objects are listed as they might not be compatible with the search. Then again, you can take a photo of text in another language and have Google translate it for you. This initially takes a lot of time until it goes to the servers and comes back in a readable format, and then you have to ask Goggles to translate it for you. It might be useful when you have text in languages that you cannot enter using the keyboard, but it is indeed a very slow process.
Another dumb feature of this app is the crop feature. Supposedly, you can crop out unwanted portion of the scene you are photographing to be processed. Ideally you should be able to crop out the image after you have photographed it and then send it for scanning. But here you are actually setting a crop-able area on the screen and then you have to try and fit in the interesting part of the scene into this cropped area on a mobile screen. I would rather just take the phone up close to the object and photograph it. Makes no sense to me at all.
What Google can do to make this a better app is to have a selection screen where you mention explicitly what it is that you are taking a photo of and then have Google’s serves process the image. This could be much faster and return much better and relevant results.
Do let me know, if you find a really good use for this app.
