Windows will soon let you get text from Android photos

Microsoft is about to update the Phone Link app, allowing you to select and copy text directly from photos synced from your Android phone. This feature is currently being tested on the Insider Preview version and is expected to be available to all users soon.

Phone Link (called Link to Windows on phones) helps you sync calls, messages, notifications and photos – even project the entire phone screen – between your Android phone and your Windows computer. The application also works more limitedly with iOS devices, only syncing notifications, messages and calls via Bluetooth.

Previously, the Snipping Tool on Windows had the ability to extract text from images. The new update of Phone Link helps you perform this operation right in the application, saving more time. This feature is available on Phone Link 1.24051.91.0 and has been tested on Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta Channel).

In testing, Phone Link’s optical character recognition (OCR) worked fine, but still produced more errors than Samsung or Apple’s text extraction tools on the same photo of a book page. For long text, you can enable cross-device copy-paste, extract the text on your phone and send it to your PC for better results.