Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Google's Goggles visual search application is coming to Apple's iPhone (News - Alert) soon - the new, slimmer, sleeker iPhone 4, your old one was soooo bulky.

Industry observer Clint Boulton, citing ReadWriteWeb, reports that Google (News - Alert) will also release APIs for its image recognition.

Let's hope they've spiffed the product up. The lads over a Phones Review in Britain say "Google Goggles v1.1 delivers better artwork, logo and barcode recognition and also now makes searches based on photos stored in the phone's gallery. I have to say when I've occasionally used Google Goggles on my Android (News - Alert) handset it hasn't done too well, but hopefully by the time it comes to the iPhone it will be better."

The idea of Google Goggles is that the mobile application, according to Boulton, will let users "take a picture of a location or objects such as a product or painting from their smartphone and do a Google search that pulls up information associated with the image."

It's been long-dreamed of and much talked about, but never quite this close to reality for a mass market:

"The image a user snaps with his or her camera is a query that gets sent to Google's cloud computing data centers and processed with computer vision algorithms," Boulton says, adding that it'll be available for smartphones based on Google's Android operating system version 1.6 and up, and "is a popular draw among users of the Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One and HTC (News - Alert) Droid Incredible."

And the gee- guys over at UberGizmo are psyched, too. "Even better news is the confirmation that the next logical step for the app would be to release public APIs, which would essentially allow developers to build their own visual search and image recognition applications without reinventing the wheel.

Google says it will be coming to the iPhone soon, but isn't nailing down timing. Google officials are also saying the image recognition technology that powers Goggles via APIs will be released "by the end of the year," according to Boulton.

And it's useful for much more than just searching out pictures of your ex online: "Now travelers to other countries can take pictures of street signs, restaurant menus and other text and read them in their native language. This stranger in a strange land scenario is currently the primary use case for Goggles," Boulton says.