Google maintains its hold on the bleeding edge of tech with the latest addition to their Google portfolio, Google Nose. Nose is an app that allows users to identify smells through the application of Google’s tried and tested search algorithms, and a database of millions of scentibytes of smell data. They had apparently included olfactory sensors in the same vehicles that they deployed for mapping, and have since built a diverse database of scents and smells through the many miles that the vehicles have combed.
Google Nose can work in two ways, according to the site HERE. One can either identify smells, the way Soundhound does with music, or sample any of the available sells Google has stored in their databases. The project is still in the Beta stage, so there are some bugs (users have reported wrong scents, but nothing major) and the supported device list is pretty sparse, though it should grow as the devs get hard at work on the technology. It might seems a pretty inane ability, but imagine being able to tell what ingredients went into your food, ebooks that actually smell like hard copies and melanoma diagnosis without the need for an invasive sample-taking. We imagine that this tech will be merged with the upcoming Google Glass project, to bring us digitized versions of the major human senses. The possibilities are endless, and we here can’t wait for it to get out of the Beta testing stage.