Apple iOS 15: How to use Live Text feature in images and camera app on iPhone

Along with iOS 15, a new feature called Live Text is now available on eligible Apple devices. The handy iPhone Live Text OCR allows users to quickly select and copy, paste or lookup text from within the Camera and Photos app. Being one of the handiest features in iOS 15, the live text will help users to extract numbers instantly from documents, save addresses, phone numbers and much more. 

While Apple's rival Alphabet offers similar functionality through Google Lens, Apple has integrated the feature deep into iOS 15. In other words, users do not require a third-party application for it. The feature is based on optical character recognition (OCR), a technology that can recognize text or characters in an image and extract them. Using the iPhone Live Text OCR, iPhones owners can scan through screenshots, images in the Apple Photos app or directly through the camera. 

How to use iPhone Live Text OCR?

• Make sure that the device is running iOS 15
• Open the Camera App on iPhone 
• While pointing at a scene with text in it, locate the new Live Text button that appears at the bottom right corner of the screen in the form of three horizontal lines 
• When the user points at an image with text, a yellow viewfinder surrounds the text on the screen when the camera recognizes the presence of text in seen 
• Tap the Live Text Button 
• Now, the user can select, copy, look up the selected text, translate and share recognized text 
• Text with emails, dates or phones numbers can be copied with a long-press 

If a user wants to copy some text from a picture clicked before or downloaded from the internet, that can be done too. Open the picture in Apple Photos. The images with recognisable text in them will be marked with the same viewfinder icon with three lines in the camera application. By tapping on the icon, the app will separate all readable text from the image and allow the user to select the part that needs to be shared. Users can swipe on the screen over the required text to copy it as well. 

Image: APPLE.COM