Google’s newest feature – “Now on Tap’ recognition

By Team Logicserve

  • March 17, 2016,

Google ‘Now on Tap’ sounded absurdly cool when it was released a year ago, but it has failed to gain the momentum that was expected and alternatively been quite dreary. It is clearly toying with a component that could make it substantially more valuable. Users are seeing optical character recognition as a major aspect of ‘On Tap’; however the execution appears to be very early.

With respect to optical character recognition, it is not quite the same as checking the content on a page or as it has been consistent on Google. This new feature is now equipped to identify the text embedded in photos like regular searches. An important factor to consider would be that this feature does not work on all phones equally. Different phones give different OCR results and one has to have an android device upgraded to the latest 6.0 Marshmallow version to try out this cool feature.

It was first spotted by Reddit users who experimented with this idea. The highlight of OCR on Google ‘Now on Tap’ is by all accounts in its initial stages as it gives distinctive results every time. Most of the times, it does not convey any results at all. The simplest way to work around this is to take a picture from the upgraded 6.0 version of the Android camera and scan it with Google Now on Tap. This amazing feature reads all the content or even phone numbers from the image and furnishes results.

Google Now - Latest Feature (Img. courtesy :gadgets.ndtv.com )
Google Now – Latest Feature (Img. courtesy :gadgets.ndtv.com )

We tried this feature on the Nexus 6P and it worked several times. It helped us find information of the text in the images as above. While some Reddit clients checked for book and TV information and got their corresponding outcome. While some scanned phone numbers and were shown Google Card. Since this feature is quite in the nascent stage, Google hasn’t promoted it yet. Regardless, it is an appreciated component for most Android users.

Character recognition to read posts (img courtesy :gadgets.ndtv.com)
Character recognition to read posts (img courtesy :gadgets.ndtv.com)

Although the feature hasn’t been doing the best job at recognition. In the above example, when pointed at a calendar full of manual hand written notes, the viewfinder recognizes ‘Clift’ instead of ‘’Clift’. Peculiarly, when I pointed the camera specifically at Villa Florence (the name of an inn in San Francisco) and centered in on the content, it didn’t show any results. Similarly, while attempting to point the camera at the Giants sweatshirt. As you see from the above picture the group’s name and logo is exceptionally conspicuous. Easily identifiable phone numbers and large texts may work well. This clearly is at its experimental stage but could show signs of improvement or could disappear entirely.

Google will now let you export your files as epub files, a common format for eBooks. This is part of a new feature by Google Drive. One of the components of epub files are that their design is indicated by the gadget’s screen size, something missing in pdf formats. Besides Amazon Kindle devices, the file is supported by almost all the e-readers.

Reference : https://goo.gl/vXMN70

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