Okay Google: Take A Photo/Video Comes To Google Mobile Search

By Barry Schwartz

Published: March 20, 2014 at 9:15 am

Google announced on Google+ that you can now ask your Android phone to take a photo or a video by saying, “Ok Google,” then “take a photo” or “take a video.”

This will launch the Android camera app in the photo or video mode so you can quickly take a photo. I should note that there are other variations of the “take a photo” that work, such as “shoot a” and “take a picture” and so on. Google Glass has supported this since it launched, so it makes sense to extend this to Android devices.

Where this may come in handy for search is in the future, if Google extends Google Search mobile to handle, “scan OCR code” or “find products similar to…” and so forth.

Here is a picture of the new feature:

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About the author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.