Google buys startup that helps your phone identify objects

Google has purchased Moodstocks, a French startup that specializes in speedy object recognition from a smartphone, showing (again) the search giant's intense interest in AI. Unlike other products (including Google's own Goggles object recognition app) Moodstocks does most of the crunching on your smartphone, rather than on a server. While Google seemingly has some pretty good image-spotting tech already, like the canny visual categorization in Photos, it says it's just getting started. "There is still a long way to go [with machine learning], and that's where Moodstocks comes in," the company said in a blog post (translated). The deal seems to fall in to the "aqui-hire" category, as Moodstocks will cease its own recognition services, and its team of engineers will join Google at its R&D center in Paris. Google is rumored to be working on a feature that allows Android users to search directly from their photos (below), though the company didn't say if the acquisition is related.