According to Agence France Presse (News - Alert), Google on Thursday released free software that "lets smartphones based on its Android (News - Alert) operating systems be used as language translation tools."

The Goggles application can now help you translate English, French, Italian, German or Spanish "after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones such as the Internet giant's Nexus One."

Or as ZDnet says, "For those of you planning on going abroad this summer with your Android-based smartphone, there will be another tool at your disposal should you have some issues with the local language."

Google (News - Alert) software engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said in a message posted on Google's site that 'We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages."

'Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.' Yeah, well, that's this reporter's goal too. Bet on Android getting there first.

As AFP explains it, Goggles is 'computer vision software that lets smartphone users do Internet searches based on pictures taken with the gadgets instead of typed in search queries."

As Electronista says, "Users only need to highlight the section they would like to translate and press the shutter button to scan text. If Goggles recognizes the text, it will offer a translation option. The feature can now recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and translates to many more languages."

Or as ZDnet says, "To take advantage of these new-found language skills, the user must point the camera of the phone towards the text, snap the photo and hope that Google Goggles can read it."

In one of the more dry understatements of the year, aforesaid Google software engineers told AFP that 'computer vision is a hard problem. While we are excited about Goggles v1.1, we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize.'

The latest Goggles program is available as a free download for devices running on Android version 1.6 or higher.