Almost every feed I follow covered Google yesterday as they unveiled a number of “incredible” new features. From voice search and translation, to location and visual search, as educators our job is to customise and use them for education where appropriate.
Near Instant Voice Translation – that will translate between English and Spanish in the cloud, via your mobile phone. Well that is MFL sorted. Future international conferences will run smoother as long as delegates bring their Android smartphone.
Customized Suggest Based on Location – The feature will soon make use of location information when searches are performed on mobile devices.
Google Product Search Combined With Inventory Feeds from Local Retailers – local mobile product search will soon tell you where the nearest store with a product is and whether that product is in stock. So that is the retail market at the beck and call of Google.
Next, Google Launches Real-Time Search Now – click that button and you’ll see the closest-by search results ranked by user rating. Handy if you are looking for a restaurant in Birmingham during the SSAT conference?
My personal favourite, Google Goggles – if not for the name. Visual search, take a photo, click a button and Google will analyze imagery and text in the photo for your search query. Pretty exciting. With 1 billion images included in the index today, excluding facial recognition until privacy concerns are figured out, this could be exciting. But how will we use it, answers in a comment please….