Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Does anyone suck at that?

Does android even have native OCR? Last I checked everything required an OCR app of varying quality (including windows/linux).

On ios/macos you can literally just click on a picture and select the text in it as if it wasn't a picture. I know for sure on iOS you don't even open an app to do it, just any picture you can select it.

Last I checked the Opensource OCR tools were decent but behind the closed source stuff as well.

Random google result of OCR on android (could be outdated) - https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/10te5et/why_oc...



Android has had built in OCR for a few releases. You can copy and paste text from any image/app you can display on the screen.

To use, go to the app switcher and just start selecting text.

It's funny trying to select text in a video while the video is playing...


> Android has had built in OCR for a few releases. You can copy and paste text from any image/app you can display on the screen.

AFAIK this is a feature only available on Google Pixel devices. so not on 'Android' in general.

For one, my Oppo device running Android 12 doesn't have it.

Yes, Android fragmentation sucks.


I use Google Lens for OCR in photos and the swipe-up+"select" feature for OCR in arbitrary apps/websites.

That at least works for Pixel phones. Not sure about Samsung and others.


Not sure about other Android OEMs but OCR has been built in to Samsung Gallery (equivalent to Photos app on iPhones) for a while. Works the same way - long press on text in an image to select it as text. Haven't had any issues with it.


> Does android even have native OCR?

Tesseract? https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: