Tech Tip: Google Lens is the Coolest Tool You Aren’t Using

This Tech Tip brought to you by Catalyit

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and that rings true when it comes to using them for search. Instead of relying on Google to do its magic with a few chosen words, you can use your camera (or a photo), and Google will use what it sees to deliver search results. Since it ‘sees’ more than a couple words, your results are robust. It even reads the text on the images.

For me, it all started with an annoying vine in the backyard. I pointed my camera, and not only was the plant identified (skunk vine was not ideal), I had tips on how to get rid of it, product recommendations, and sad stories on its impending return.

My husband – a club someone was using on the course. One wave of the camera (you don’t even need to take a photo) and he knew anything and everything about his next ‘game-changer,’ including the current price at 10 places with links to buy.

The business upside is endless. A quick wave of your camera to find the product manual on a piece of hardware, related documents for a template, and the replacement piece for a broken chair. Google Lens is a productivity superstar and a jeopardy champ mixed in one.

And then it gets EVEN cooler with the translate feature. Point the camera at anything with text, choose the language you need to see it in, and bam.... Translated! And the app will read it to you. This took 1-2 seconds. It’s probably a pretty literal word translation on a cover like this. But, wow, it can really bridge a language barrier!

Google Lens can even turn a printed picture of a page of text, or whiteboard of writing, into digital text for you to copy with no effort.

We’ll let Google tell you more here.

Try it! Download the Google app and click the camera icon in the search bar, or use with Chrome today.

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