14 ways Google Lens can save you time on Android

Psst: come close. Your Android phone has a little-known superpower – a futuristic system for bridging the physical world around you and the digital universe on your device. It’s one of Google’s best-kept secrets. And it can save you tons of time.

It’s called Google Lens, and it’s been lurking around on Android and quietly getting more and more capable for years. Google doesn’t make a big deal about it, weirdly enough, and you really have to go out of your way to even realize it exists.

At its core, Google Lens is best described as a search engine for the real world. It uses artificial intelligence to identify text and objects both within images and in a live view from your phone’s camera, and it then lets you learn about and interact with those elements in all sorts of interesting ways. But while Lens’s ability to, say, identify a flower, look up a book, or give you information about a landmark is certainly impressive, it’s the system’s more mundane-seeming productivity powers that are far more