ISSUE 46 • ANDROID ADVISOR 79FEATUREand in 2017 it got eyes. Baked into Assistant on Pixel
phones and soon to on Android phones everywhere is
Google Lens, a new technology that uses the camera
to interact with the world around you.
You can identify landmarks, get restaurant reviews,
scan addresses, and even input cumbersome Wi-
Fi passwords just by holding your phone up to
something. Lens is also able to ID things in pictures
you’ve already taken, so if you’ve forgotten the name
of the church you visited in Italy a couple years ago,
it will ID it for you. And lead engineer Rajan Patel is
already teasing the next wave of features, including
shopping and augmented reality. You might even call
it the new Google Glass. Too soon?Google Lens can
extract email addresses
and URLs from photos,
dropping them straight
into Google Assistant