Google Assistant can now read, translate text on KaiOS

Google on Tuesday announced that now within Google Assistant, KaiOS users in India can use Google Lens to read, translate and define words.

At Google I/O in 2019, the US based search engine giant brought a camera-based translation to Google Lens to help understand information. With Lens, one can point the camera at text one see and translate it into more than 100 languages and can even speak the words out loud in the preferred language.

"We brought these Lens capabilities to Google Go, so even those on the most affordable smartphones can access them. Today we are extending this capability to the millions of Google Assistant users on KaiOS devices in India," the company said in a statement.

It is currently available in English and several Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil, and will soon be available in Kannada and Gujarati. Users can simply press the right soft key once within Assistant to access and use this feature.

Devices powered by KaiOS have been in the market only since mid-2017. But thanks to the huge popularity of Jio phones from Reliance, this light Linux-based operating system today has a greater market share than iOS in India.

Built by San Diego, California-headquartered start-up KaiOS Technologies and led by CEO Sebastien Codeville, KaiOS is the third biggest operating system globally after Android and iOS.