Lesser-Known Google Apps That You Should Try
Google’s got a bunch of apps in the play/app store and you can basically find them in almost every category of applications. Be it taking notes or making online payments, Google has got you covered. But in the midst of its popular apps such as YouTube, Chrome or the Google App itself, you find a few apps that you might have never tried or even heard of before. Few of them are in development phase while the rest are stable but all of them are downright awesome! So here I present to you some of the Google apps that you need to install ASAP:
Crowdsource
As the name suggests, it allows users to contribute by helping Google in recognising images, handwritings, evaluate sentiments and also capture and tag the objects in the image (avoid taking photos of personal stuff). You just have to specify the languages in which you can contribute and you are good to go. Go to settings and you can find a reminder to evoke you every day to get involved in the process. It takes a few minutes to help Google which caters to millions of people worldwide. Mobile crowdsourcing has never been that easy!
Measure
To all the folks who’ve got a thing for AR but don’t have capable hardware to do so, trust me you’ll love it. This app is basic, to say the least, but provides a handy feature for everyday life. What it does is that it measures the distance between two points using your phone’s camera, be it length or height that needs to be quantified. Also, it has a copy button to copy the measurement to clipboard. It is accurate most of the time but still need some updates to work with fewer errors. Overall I would recommend everyone to at least try this app and see for yourself.
Motion Stills
Similar to Measure, using AR elements, this app helps create awesome short clips which you can either save or send in GIF format to others through any other app. It has some neat features like generating a fast-forward video, AR mode and Motion Still which allows the user to change the speed, loop the video back and forth and even stabilise it using Google’s stabilising and rendering tech. My favourite is the AR mode having various animal characters to play with.
Opinion Rewards
This app has been around for a long time and recently got an overhaul just like other Google Apps. It asks a few questions (they aren’t opinions, to be honest) that the user has to answer and after the survey, it awards us with a few bucks that are added to our Google account which can be used to purchase movies, books or even apps from the Play Store (mind you, this cannot be used to make any payments outside the Play Store). I’ve been using this app for almost two and a half years and earned enough credits to buy the prime version of Nova Launcher :’)
Storyboard
Want to instantly convert a video clip into a comic book page? This app primarily does that. As shown in the app description, the process is pretty basic:
- Load a video.
- Pull down to refresh till you get a layout you like.
- Tap to share or save. That’s it!
I would prefer to use a short video clip with not a lot of scenes as this only spawns a comic book strip with 5–10 photos max.
Overall, it provides quite a unique way to capture moments from your video clip to share amongst each other.
PoemPortraits
This is not an app but a website in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture that generates some stunning portraits of you using AI. All you have to do is enter a word and click a selfie. It automatically creates a poem using its algorithm that is etched onto your selfie (even if you don’t take a photo, it will show you the poem) which you can save on your phone memory. To be honest, I’ve never seen anything like this before. Trust me, you’ll be enthralled after seeing the photo.
