What’s the point? Well there’s no point in letting Google solve a sudoku puzzle for you. But it’s fun to try it out at least for once. It’s just amazing how the whole technology works. First off is the image scanning and then processing and then recognizing that the image is of a sudoku and then going ahead and solving it. Artificial intelligence built in to a smartphone. Uber cool to impress or to have fun even for 15 mins.
Finding the Google Googles option isn’t straightforward. When you hit the Google icon, you get a bunch of apps (youtube, Orkut etc..). This is not the place to find the goggles. At the bottom of the Google app screen you will find three menu icon – Search, Apps and Settings. Click Search and you will see a search bar. Observe the search bar carefully and you will find a Camera icon and a microphone icon. Hit the camera Icon and you should be good to go for Googgles. Initially there will be user agreement acceptance and once you get past that Goggles are ready.
Take out your favorite paper and click the picture of sudoku puzzle. On a 2G connection the whole process took 40 seconds. It has a learning curve like Sudoku and once you get used to it, the whole thing will be done in a jiffy. I tried taking pictures at different angles and depending on the information on the image and light or shade on it, the result differs. I got lucky most of the time and with a little practice you can get lucky too. The puzzle I used is from DNA which has a colored squares which actually make the job tougher for Googles. If you have a simple white background and black letters the scanning and processing would be faster.
Goggles recognizes that the picture taken is of a Sudoku puzzle and once you click it, Goggles offers you to solve the puzzle for you. When you hit Solve, your puzzle is solved.
Googles is a visual search application which can search based on the image you took on your phone. It can be used to identify barcodes, print ads and many other things.