Visual shopping on Google photos!! I am speechless

I’m a big fan of visual shopping/search and innovations around it always intrigues me. Visual shopping is powered by Computer vision(Image recognition) and a well known company that has constantly released good experience around this technology is Google.

I was going through Google photos on my device on Tuesday(29th October 2019) and I saw a feature that left me speechless for a while. Google lens on Google photos!!. Google today has incorporated visual shopping while checking through your photos. Google lens has been around for a while but it’s usage directly on your photos is a great experience from Google.

See the illustration of this below…

The first photo is selected from Google photos and beneath it are 4 icons. The black arrow points to Google lens.

The second photo shows what happens after tapping the Google lens icon. Pulsating dots appear on the photo which signifies a crawling activity for search of similar items

The third photo shows that the sweater was the selected pattern crawled and the output displays the related/recommended items after the search

Finally you can tap on any item to proceed with shopping.

This to me is one of Google’s finest innovations. Amazon’s image rekognition is also a similar technology that myself, Olalekan Elesin and Samuel James have used to build a visual search platform. You can try out the demo here.

Visual search/shopping is stressless with a good experience. It is said that as visual beings, our brains stores and processes images 60,000 times faster descriptively than text. Thus our brain retains for a long time what we see pictorially than text.

For eCommerce, visual search is a technology that “turns images of interest (from real life, the Internet, or social media screenshots) into shopping opportunities from the retailers’ collection.” With visual search what you are looking for becomes faster and you can also get the added benefit of finding things you didn’t even know you were looking for as a form of recommendation.

To conclude, I’ll like to quote Daryl Plummer on Visual search, “By 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%”.

Watch out for this space for more on Visual Search!

And before I say good bye...I am still speechless..