Google Lens Can Now Recognize a Billion Items

Google said in a blog post that its AI-powered 'Google Lens' camera tool can now recognize over a billion items. When it launched last year, it was only able to detect around 250,000 items. The Verge reports: The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens' optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before. The 1 billion items figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely doesn't include more obscure, unshoppable objects, such as a gaming console from the 1990s or the first edition of a rare book. But it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who's simply just looking up an item they're curious about.

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