Google Lens’s entire purpose is to automatically take candid photos of hard-to-capture subjects like kids and pets.
It’s quite small, sort of cute, and is basically a cube with a big lens in the front. There is no display, or viewfinder, and it is meant to be used hands-free via an attached clip that doubles as a stand. It costs $249 and will work with iOS 10 and Android 7 or later. There’s no ship date yet.
The camera uses artificial intelligence to both evaluate picture quality and see if someone it “knows” is within view. If it decides that something is a good picture and it recognizes the subject (which could be a person or a pet), it takes a short clip — which can be saved as a video, a GIF, or as one of Google’s newly announced Motion Photos. You can also select still images if moving pictures are not really your thing.
It saves a stream of these photos to its internal memory. Then, it connects wirelessly to your phone and a new app called Clips shows a feed of “suggested clips.” You then have the option to save these, or delete them.
