By Paresh Dave and Yuvraj Malik
(Reuters) -Alphabet Inc’s Google on Wednesday laid out plans to bridge the real world and its digital universe of search, Maps and other services using new advances in artificial intelligence.
At its annual Google I/O developer conference, the company previewed a feature that would eventually let users take video of shelves of wine bottles at a store and ask the search app to automatically identify options from Black-owned wineries.
“This is like having a supercharged Ctrl+F for the world around you,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, referring to the keyboard shortcut for finding something in a document. “You can search your whole world, asking questions any way and anywhere.”
Similarly, users later this year will be able to snap a photo of a product and locate nearby stores where it is available, Raghavan said.
Later this year, Maps will launch an immersive view for some big cities that fuses Street View and aerial images “to create a rich, digital model of the world,” Google said.
In other announcements, a relaunched Google Wallet app will support virtually storing driver licenses in some areas of the United States later this year, mirroring a feature Apple Inc debuted for Arizona on its iPhones in March.
Google also said that its Pixel 6a smartphone, which carries less robust cameras, memory and display than its more expensive Pixel 6, would go on sale July 21 starting at $449.
(Reporting by Paresh Dave in Oakland, Calif. and Yuvraj Malik in BengaluruEditing by Paul Simao and Matthew Lewis)
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