Google Lens launched in 2017 to identify objects and text through a smartphone camera.
Google announced Lens at Google I/O in May 2017. The technology was designed to interpret what a camera sees, including landmarks, plants, animals, products, and printed words. It could also translate or copy text from the real world.
Lens initially appeared through Google Assistant and Google Photos before expanding to more Android phones and other Google services. Its functions have grown to include visual shopping, homework assistance, QR-code recognition, and searches based on selected parts of an image.
Google Lens is not the same as Google Images. Google Images generally retrieves pictures from web pages, whereas Lens starts with a camera view or an existing picture and uses computer vision to understand it. That difference explains why Lens can answer questions about an object even when the user does not know its name.