Android Mobile Vision restores operation and adds Text API

As an important framework for finding objects in photos and video, Mobile Vision operation for Android devices is restored in Google Play Services v9.2.

This new version of Google Play Services fixes a download issue in Google Play Services v.9.0 that caused a service outage. See release notes for details.

We’re also pleased to announce the Text API, a new component for Android Mobile Vision.

The Text API’s optical character recognition technology reads Latin character text (e.g. English, Spanish, German, French, etc.) in photos and returns the text as well as the organizational structure (paragraphs, lines, words). Mobile apps can now:

• Organize photos that contain text
• Automate tedious data entry for credit cards, receipts, and business cards
• Translate documents (along with the Cloud Translate API)
• Keep track of real objects, such as reading the numbers on subway trains
• Provide accessibility features

If you want to get started quickly, you can try our codelab which will get Android developers reading text with their apps in under an hour.

Like the Mobile Vision Face and Barcode components, the Text API runs on-device and is suitable for real-time applications. For more information, check out the Mobile Vision Developer site.