Circle to Search is my favorite tool for identifying the birds and the bees

Every feature addition that Google makes to Android and its other products always seems to funnel me back to the company’s original purpose: search. As its name suggests, Circle to Search is one very obvious example. Long-pressing the home button to pull up a search dialog that trawls the internet for content you’ve highlighted on your screen is as convenient as it is useful, but not perhaps in the way Google intended. Marketing material pitches Circle to Search as a tool for finding products to purchase in shows and other visual media. However, I’ve found a far more natural use for it (pun intended).

I’m an avid nature lover, and thrive on learning about new species I encounter on my travels. I have specific identification apps on my phone for identifying birds and plants based on images. However, they’re often slow to trigger and cumbersome, demanding too many seconds to activate or a still snapshot before my subject inevitably flies away. These tools are undoubtedly useful for shots that are already stored on my device, but they largely fail to suffice in the moment.