Your mobile camera can do much more than just photos and videos: thanks to the magic of Artificial Intelligence, both Apple and Google offer you from text capture to copying or translation. It is really useful, it has many more uses than it seems. We detail a few.
The camera of our phone has become the best witness of our whole life; It is not in vain that he records for posterity from those memorable moments some who, as much as we prefer to forget them, end up saved in that album of curiosities to which we return in search of nostalgia. But not only does it record photos and video, it is also capable of working almost miracles. Artificial Intelligence changed cameras forever.
With Google Lens and Live Text, forget about typing
The mobile camera, and the power offered by smartphones, makes us carry in our pocket the most powerful text recognition and translation tool. Both from an Android and on the iPhone: copy text from a photo, paste it into a note, capture the license plate of a car that circulates a hundred meters or translate a restaurant menu. Point the camera and you have it.
Google introduced OCR and translation recognition in an app that is included within Google’s own application: Lens. For its part, Apple renewed the iPhone and iPad camera with the Live Text function, a software for recognition and translation on the fly that comes with the latest version of its operating system: iOS 15.
A curious video circulated on social networks showing the most curious capabilities of text recognition with the phone’s camera: copy class notes remotely. Despite the reprehensible practice (the mobile is not used in class) the truth is that it perfectly exemplifies the enormous power of systems such as Lens or LiveText: copying a text by hand is a thing of the past.
students are starting to steal each other's notes with iOS 15 and it's... kind of genius pic.twitter.com/klE992DuBn
— juan (@juanbuis) October 14, 2021
Given the uses that are being given to text recognition technology, we have asked ourselves: what other curious tasks can it solve? We have several examples:
- Make an ebook from a physical book. It is not exactly comfortable, especially if you want to digitize an encyclopedia, but it is possible: copy the text page by page and go pasting it to a note. Then you export it as PDF and you already have your ebook.
- Clean notes instantly. Take a photo of the notes you have written and both Lens and LiveText will convert them to typed text. Of course, make sure you don’t write in a doctor’s hand, what miracles they don’t do.
- Convert the PowerPoints of the presentation to text. As there is no presentation without the usual PowerPoints, with the camera you can convert them to text in order not to save all the photos in the gallery. More practical, although you run out of graphics and kitty jokes.
- Instant translation. From the English book, from what came to you two days ago on AliExpress … Your phone’s camera will tell you what any text in another language hides. And without downloading any application.
- You can also use text recognition without the camera. Both Apple’s LiveText and Google’s Lens work with any photo in your gallery, without pointing the camera. Upload the image to Google Photos or the iPhone reel and click on the relevant icon (a square with a dot on Android and three lines within a square on iPhone, both at the bottom).
- Search the Internet for any text without having to type it. What do you want to find more information about a sentence or a written text and you don’t feel like typing it in the search engine? Sloth to Power: Capture the words with the camera and search them on the Internet directly.
- Email a handwritten note. Writing by hand is more out of date than the physical keyboard on a mobile, but you may keep the romanticism of the paper. Well then: you can write your handwritten emails, copy them with Lens or LiveText and send them transcribed by Gmail. The same with a love letter, for example.
- Digitize family recipe albums. Inheriting a recipe is almost like receiving a treasure. And they are often handwritten – a risk if you want that content not to get lost. So now you know: capture each recipe photo by photo, as if you had infiltrated the kitchen of a luxury restaurant, and transform them into text notes. Much more practical.
- Listen to the text in front of you. What do you want the mobile to read the book you are reading? Point with Google Lens, go to the text tab and take a photo of it. You will see that the option to “Listen” appears. Press there and the mobile will sing the words. Unfortunately on Apple LiveText it is not available.
Google and Apple achieved not only powerful tools, but also extremely practical ones. They are somewhat hidden in phones, but they are worth a look: on the iPhone or iPad you just have to open the camera and point to a text, the capture icon will appear; on android open the camera and look for the Lens icon. The operation for both is similar.
And you? What other uses do you use Google Lens or Apple LiveText for?