Google Lens can perform many different tasks with your smartphone’s camera thanks to advanced machine learning, such as foreign text translations, landmark identification, and business cards to contacts conversion, to name a few. With this year’s Google I/O conference, we have another cool Lens feature to look forward to — receipt calculations.
To elaborate, if you’re out for dinner at a restaurant with friends, when you get the bill, your math skills need to come out. Really, your calculator app or custom shortcut would probably come out, but what if you could just point your phone’s camera at the receipt and get an on-screen receipt-specific calculator to appear? That’s exactly what Google Lens can do.
Right now, it’s in beta testing, and when it’s released, it will first only be available on Google Go, the slimmed down version of Google Search meant for super-budget phones with low storage and less processing power. After launching on Google Go, it will be made available in other apps such as Google and Google Assistant.
To use it, you would open up Google Go, tap the Google Lens icon, point your camera at the bill, and watch as the calculator appears with the bill total and a suggested tip amount added up for your total. You will be able to change the tip percentage if you go lower or higher, which will recalculate the tip and total. There’s a box to remove taxes from the tip calculation if you need it.
Even better, there’s a “Split” box where you can input the number of friends or family who want to pay separately. Just put the number in there, and the Google Lens calculator will show you how much each person owes with tips included.
While currently unavailable, we won’t need to wait too long to get our hands on this feature. According to Aparna Chennapragada, vice president and general manager for camera and AR products, Google Lens’ automatic tip calculator is set to roll out sometime in May 2019 along with other significant enhancements. Of course, we’ll go through the feature in greater detail once we get our hands on it, so stay tuned.
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