With the arrival of Android 6.0 Marshmallow last year, a new feature was one of the many that the new Android flavour packed. It was Now on Tap, a natural evolution of Google Now. In short, still the good old Google Now but better. And now it is getting even smarter.
According to Google, Now on Tap will now also be able to translate text.
Normally, to call up Google Now on Tap into action, one presses and holds the physical or capacitive home button. Then Now on Tap springs into action, reads whatever is displayed, makes sense of it and returns contextual information on the same e.g. if you are reading an email or text message and you called up Now on Tap, it will scan the message’s content, in this case the text, isolate the keywords e.g. references to popular names, movies, book titles and so on and provide context.
Translate on Now on Tap will work the same way. Just fire up Now on Tap when you encounter a block of text that requires translation and it will handle the rest. No need to go back and forth between the Google Translate app and whatever you are doing. Now that’s being smart!
However, only English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian are supported at the moment.
Now on Tap, in the new update, will also be able to identify quick-response (QR) codes and barcodes and provide quick contextual information on the products they’re on. This is in addition to Now on Tap’s recently added ability to recognise famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower in Paris when the camera app’s viewfinder is open.
On top of that, a “Discover” feature has also been added to provide a stream of content related to whatever is displayed on a user’s screen at the time of Now on Tap being called up. All that one needs is to tap the Discover icon to access the same.
