On my Android phone if you open the camera App there's a Google Lens icon at top left next to the menu hamburger icon.

You can access it without voice, by opening Assistant (long-press Home, double-press Power, etc.) and then typing "Lens" into the search box.

Ridiculously, there's no way that I can see to get an app shortcut icon to it.

The is a Lens app you can install to get an icon. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ar....

Note: I work at Google but not on Android/Lens

OK, I've done that. It's pretty crazy that the app takes up 40MB just to add an icon to my apps menu.

I also use Lense for QR and like any typical app just installed through Play and launch normally.

Voice Assist is yet another privacy invasion vector imho, there are too many anecdotal first hand accounts of someone talking about fishing and suddenly getting banner adds for boat trips everywhere.

You don’t think it’s more likely that a person who talked about fishing also searched for fishing gear using Google? Or “Likes” fishing on Facebook? Or follows a fishing person on Twitter?

The technology and storage that would be required to parse non-device-directed speech doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be profitable since there are so many other reliable signals that are much cheaper.