A video broadcast at Google I/O showing Urmila from Uttar Peadesh using Google lens. (Video Grab Via Twitter)Among several high-tech announcements at its annual developer conference I/O late Tuesday, Google unveiled a simple repackaging of its prevalent features coupled with a breakthrough compression technology to bring out an update on its Lens product that can read out loud words in over 100 languages, “helping the millions of adults around the world who struggle to read everyday things like street signs of ATM instructions”. However, the feature was pilot tested with about a dozen languages including Hindi – and one of the test subjects, Google said, was a woman from Uttar Pradesh named Urmila.
In a short video played at the event in San Francisco, Urmila, who cannot read, used Google Lens on her smartphone to understand words written in Hindi by letting the app read those words out loud. The Google Lens app could also translate words written in other languages and read them out in Hindi.
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“When you point your camera at text, Lens can now read it out loud to you. It highlights the words as they are spoken, so you can follow along and understand the full context of what you see. You can also tap on a specific word to search for it and learn its definition. This feature is launching first in Google Go, our Search app for first-time smartphone users. Lens in Google Go is just over 100 KB and works on phones that cost less than $50,” said Aparna Chennapragada vice-president, Google Lens and AR.
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Currently, the text-to-speech feature is available on Google’s Translate app, which lets users take pictures of text that needs to be translated and then can read it out loud. However, in this case, the back-end functionality takes place on the cloud or can be downloaded on a device to make it work offline. Downloading a Hindi translation file takes up about 45 MB of storage.
In case of Lens on Google Go, the file has been compressed to 100 KB and clears the bottleneck of poor connectivity. The small file size also allows the app to run on low-cost Android devices, which Google Go was aimed at in the first place. Google Go is the company’s search app designed specifically for cheaper devices with limited processing and storage capabilities. At 5 MB in size, the app is aimed at users of entry-level Android devices, and allows search on slow connections and smartphones with low-space.
In the video, Urmila pointed out how the app enabled her to use ATMs and book online rail tickets by reading out the instructions.
However, according to Chennapragada, the use-case of Lens on Google Go goes beyond India.
“More than 800 million adults worldwide struggle to read things like bus schedules or bank forms. So we asked ourselves: ‘What if we used the camera to help people who struggle with reading?’,” she noted in a blog post.
