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Google Goggles can now solve your Sudoku puzzles

Sometimes, technology can be a wonderful but useless thing. Today is one of those moments.

Google has launched new versions of its Google Goggles Android app, and its Google Mobile App for iPhone. Both include a new feature for the Goggles image recognition tool that’s pretty nifty: the ability to solve Sudoku puzzles.

You heard us. Fire up either app and take a picture of a Sudoku puzzle, and it’ll analyse the image, then solve the puzzle for you, filling in the numbers on-screen.

Google has a video showing the new feature (below), but we tried it for ourselves using our local newspaper, and it worked a treat first time. Wonderful.

But at the same time, useless. The fun of Sudoku puzzles is puzzling them out for yourself, rather than having your mobile do it for you in a matter of seconds. The ability to request a single number in a puzzle that you’re stuck on would be good, but the instant solution rather takes the fun out of it.

Even so, hats off to Google’s engineers for the feature. The new Android version of Google Goggles also lets you scan product barcodes faster, and if you’re in the US, allows you to take snaps of newspaper or magazine adverts to run a web search on the product or brand, too.

 

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