Google Lens on Assistant coming to all Pixel and Pixel 2 phones soon

Google Lens will soon be an in-built feature of the Assistant.

Google has confirmed its new Google Lens feature will soon be a part of the Assistant on all Pixel and Pixel 2 smartphones. So Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, the original Pixel and Pixel XL will all have this Google Lens feature enabled within the Assistant itself. For now, the Google Lens feature is only live on the Photos app.

In a blog post, Google wrote, “Google Lens in the Assistant will be rolling out to all Pixel phones set to English in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and Singapore over the coming weeks.” So you might not see the feature on your Pixel 2 or even the original Pixel just yet. It will likely be rolled out with a future update. Google Lens is already a part of the Google Photos app and is also supposed to be a default feature in the camera app on the Pixel 2 series.

Google Lens is a revamped version of Google Goggles and can identify objects, landmarks, scan barcodes from a picture. For instance, if you have a picture of a famous painting and you apply the Google Lens option, it will correctly identify the painting and display related search items around it.

With Google Lens being added to the Assistant in the future, users will able to bring up the digital assistant and then just ask it to identify a nearby object or landmark via the camera. Google Lens can identify text as well and save information from business cards, call phone numbers seen in a image or navigate to addresses that appear in the picture.

Additionally it can identify landmarks in a city along with art, books and movies and give users more information around the same. Users can have the option of adding events, like the movie release date or gallery opening, to their calendar right from Google Lens. There’s also the added capability of scanning barcode or QR codes via the Lens feature.

Just like Google Assistant is driven by machine learning and AI, Lens relies on the same. It also pulls in data from Google’s Knowledge Search graph in order to display information about the object in question. For now, Google Lens is limited to Pixel phones, but like the Assistant, we could see this being extended to all Android smartphones in the future. However, Google has not confirmed whether this will happen.