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The latest Gboard update has a hidden scan tool for text around you
Google is beta testing Lens-like functionality for Gboard
Google’s Gboard is the go-to keyboard app for most of the best Android phones on the market. The app is loaded with features like Emoji Kitchen and accessibility tricks like one-handed mode. The company has also been working on a few AI smarts, like a proofreading utility. After a brief break from making another weird keyboard, it appears the Gboard team is back at work, beta testing a Google Lens-style OCR feature for the keyboard app.
Text-recognition superpowers are coming soon to the Chrome OS scan app
You'll also be able to create multiple pages in a scan
It's been over a year since the pandemic brought students and employees across the globe home to work online. The demand for flatbed scanners and printers have soared, and thanks to Chrome OS 89, its new scanner app makes digitizing your paper documents in a snap. It seems Google is looking for ways to make its scanning app more powerful, as it's adding two new features that should sway you away from your messy filing cabinet.
Google's Area 120 made a slick document scanner app
Stack automatically organizes your receipts and saves them in Google Drive
Area 120 is a Google team that focuses on small, experimental applications. Its latest release is its most practical yet: Stack, a document scanner and organizer that automatically grabs details via optical character recognition. It's available in the Play Store now, though it might not be accessible from all regions.
A couple of months ago, task manager Todoist received one of its biggest updates with the "Foundations" release, which added project sections, better subtask management, dynamic task addition, and more. The app's devs aren't taking the remainder of 2019 off, though, and keep releasing beta updates with new features. The latest beta is interesting to us for two reasons: auto dark theme on Android and a new, experimental OCR scanning option.
Microsoft has been testing a new Office mobile app for Android since this spring, which combines Microsoft's mobile variants of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one. The relatively new app gives you a convenient, cloud-synchronized central point for Microsoft Office document creation and management, plus scanning, notes, and more. It's an all-in-one, on-the-go Microsoft Office solution, and now it's available in public preview.
A feature I've always wanted in Google Photos is text recognition. The service can parse through my pics to find a specific face, place, thing, or even more abstract concepts like "sunset" or "happy," it can even associate an emoji with images in my gallery, but it couldn't find simple pieces of text through OCR. Well, now it can.
With the launch of the second developer preview of Android back in May, Google added a surprising and useful feature to the Overview interface. You could highlight and copy text and also make use of Android's smart text selection functionality. Optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities meant you could also pull text from images.
The Gboard team has unleashed a fresh beta of version 7.3. There's nothing immediately popping up as a brand new change or feature, but there is a lot to look at in the teardown. There are some big practical features coming, like OCR and improved handling for Battery Saver mode; but there are also some fun features like a text tool and new special effects for your custom GIFs.
Google's Goggles is all but abandoned now. We've seen Google resurrect apps from the dead and update them after years of neglect, but it's hard to imagine the company putting a fresh coat of paint on Goggles at this point. If only because the app has been superseded by others from Google, with its functionality cut off into little pieces and moved to various places inside the ecosystem.
Google Now on Tap sounded ridiculously cool when it was announced last year, but the reality of the feature has been lackluster to say the least. Google is apparently toying with a feature that could make it much more useful. Some users are seeing optical character recognition (OCR) as part of On Tap, but the implementation seems very early.
Optical character recognition, also known as OCR, is really an amazing technology. If you aren't familiar, it takes images and reads the text on them. For PDFs, it can make the words it finds searchable, selectable, and whatever else you may want to do with them. The better implementations of OCR work well enough that they pretty much make CAPTCHAs pointless. And while Google Drive has offered this function in English for over a year now, it is now rolling it out to over 200 different languages.
The Verizon Galaxy S4 started seeing a new software update earlier today, but there was no word on what it contained. Verizon has yet to update its support docs, but Samsung has been so kind as to post the details of firmware version I545VRUDMI1. As expected, it's a minor bump that keeps the device on Android 4.2.2.
We were all very excited to hear about the Google Docs for Android announcement this morning, and even more so when we learned it came with a special surprise feature: the ability to upload photos of physical documents from your Android phone and have them transcribed by Google Docs into editable text.
Have you ever been in a foreign country and tried to find your way around, order from a menu, or read a map in a language that you don’t understand? Language barriers can be incredibly frustrating, but we found a new app designed to go head-to-head with iOS’s Word Lens that can help you next time you’re in that kind of situation.
Fresh off the press, Google just announced that the latest update to its Google Goggles for Android (1.6+) introduces a Translate feature.