And text recognition too
Internet search engine giant Google has released the Google Docs for Android application, which brings in new features such as document scanning.
Google Docs for Android app allows for printed text on a page to be scanned into a Google Mobile OS driven phone, which in turn is then converted by the company into editable text and transferred to Google Docs or emailed to Gmail.
The Optical Character Recognition or OCR is all handled by Google, courtesy of the Google Books department where after an image is captured by the mobile phone’s camera it is then automatically uploaded either over 3G or WIFI to the company.
The captured image from a newspaper, magazine, book or anything that is printed, is then presented almost instantaneously in written text that is easily edited or is copy and paste ready.
Besides offering the image-capture-to-text feature, there is also the standard document writing and editing ability from a mobile phone.
Google’s Docs app can easily share an item with contacts in the Android device from within the software, with the ability to upload content straight from inside of Gmail to Google Docs.
There’s also three widgets available for the Android home screen, which all provide quick access to the commonly used features such as opening starred documents, taking a photo to upload and creating a new document.
The Google Docs app is free from the Android Market, for handsets running Android ‘Éclair’ 2.1 onwards although it’s only currently available in English at this time.