Google brought a number of interesting changes to Lens last year at its I/O conference by transforming your phone’s camera into a search tool. This feature could let you highlight and translate menu items and popular dishes at restaurants by merely pointing your camera at the restaurant menu.
Google have taken things a step further by enhancing this feature to also include menu photos taken by other restaurant customers. To have a feel of this, search for restaurants in Maps, Google will bring a list of restaurants in your locality with a menu overlay. You can click on this and pictures taken by customers of the restaurant with a chip labeled “explore dishes” will be displayed. Clicking on this brings up Google lens, which shows a list of dishes obtained from customers’ reviews.
Clicking on a given item will display the dish, with pictures taken by other customers. You may then decide to use Google Translate to display it in your native language if it is in a foreign one.
It is interesting to see how Google have coordinated the features of Lens, Maps and Translate to work well together.
This new feature dubbed the “explore dishes” feature started rolling out to Android devices on Sunday, and should be available to a number of other devices like iOS in due time.
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