I had this idea the other day, that what if there was a kind of a similar mobile helper app to go as there is for Pokemon Go. More precisely what I had in mind was an A.I. helper that I can bring in to analyze with just a few button presses wherever the game is on.
tldr; An overlay button that you can show over other mobile go apps like wbaduk's or goquest or whatever, and when pressed while watching the game in wbaduk/goquest etc, it would recreate the board to this other app (preferably baduk ai or something with as good A.I. tools) for easy import without the need of sgf hassle.
In Pokemon Go there are third party tools to get more information about the game, and the most popular ones work by overlaying that information on top of the Pokemon Go screen. The most basic function that most players use is this small round button that appears on top of Pokemon Go, and whenever they press the button, the app takes a screenshot of what it sees and analyzes it and then pops up an overlay window on top of the game window showing the information it gathered from the screenshot. Sometimes the screenshot can't capture everything and it prompts you to add extra information manually. You can this way get more information and save stats from in-game to the other app etc. Below is a youtube video showing some features of this in the most popular one, Calcy IV. At 2mins 30s part the overlayed blue round "calcy iv button" is seen on the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQJIjF4--_M&?t=02m30sSo for the game of Go there could be a similar app that has the overlay function which could show an overlay button, and whenever pressed, it would then collect information from the screen, and if it was a go board, it could get you the board position (quite) instantly without the need of saving, loading or moving around sgf files, heck I haven't even bothered to find out how I can save the sgf file of an ongoing game on the android wbaduk client. So after this the app would popup an overlay window asking about prisoners for both players (if not able to determine from the screenshot) and whether there are active ko's (illegal moves, if not able to determine from the screenshot) and whose turn is next (if not able to determine from the screenshot). With only just above information entered manually, you could then recreate the board position in the app and then analyze it with an A.I. As the go board looks pretty similar across most go apps, you should be able to use this overlay function easily with other go apps?
Then if we want to go even further, there could be another button (maybe accessible similarly with the long press like the other buttons in Pokemon Go's Calcy IV, that would open your phone's camera, and you could then move that over a real physical go board (or go game on a PC screen), and the app would then recreate the position from the real world goban into the app. I guess this would require a bit more in depth pattern recognition in the apps code to be able to recreate the position.
edit: Or perhaps instead of baking this feature into an existing AI analyzing app it could work as yet another app? An overlay app that takes a screenshot of phone screen or picture of real life goban and takes extra manual input (prisoners, illegal moves) to generate an sgf file if you prefer that only has a stillshot of a given board situation (no move history) and then has a direct link in the app to send it to another app like badukai. I guess this kind of modularity could be flexible(?), but you would then end up running say wbaduk, badukai and the third app all at the same time. However if you can get that all done with as few taps on the phone screen as possible with the help of shortcuts and gestures in the Android, I guess it could be useful this way too.
What do you think? Would you guys find this kind of feature useful? And those with the programming know-how, would it be hard to implement?