How to Use Live Text on iOS to Extract Text From the Camera and Photos App

By AppleVis, 15 September, 2021

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

In this podcast from his series looking at some of what's new and notable in iOS 15, Thomas Domville Shows us Live Text, a feature that allows you to quickly recognize text and select, copy, paste, and lookup in both the Camera and Photos app.

Here’s how Apple describes Live Text:

Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in a photo and allow users to take action. For example, users can search for and locate the picture of a handwritten family recipe, or capture a phone number from a storefront with the option to place a call. With the power of the Apple Neural Engine, the Camera app can also quickly recognize and copy text in the moment, such as the Wi-Fi password displayed at a local coffee shop. With Visual Look Up, users can learn more about popular art and landmarks around the world, plants and flowers found in nature, breeds of pets, and even find books.

Live Text is only available on devices which have an A12 Bionic chip or better. These are:

  • iPhone XS
  • iPhone XS Max
  • iPhone XR
  • iPhone 11
  • iPhone 11 Pro
  • iPhone 11 Pro Max
  • iPhone 12 mini
  • iPhone 12
  • iPhone 12 Pro
  • iPhone 12 Pro Max
  • iPhone SE (2020)
  • iPad Air 3rd generation
  • iPad mini 5th generation
  • 11-inch iPad Pro (2018 and later)
  • 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2018 and later)
  • iPad 8th generation
  • iPad Air 4th generation
  • iPad Pro (2021)

Podcast File

AppleVisPodcast1431.mp3 (10.79 MB)

Tags

iOS
New Users
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Comments

By Sabrina

2 years ago

I managed to get it working before but now it just says 0 people'

By Jo Billard

2 years ago

I have an older phone so won't be able to try this out, but I'm glad to know that my other apps will work just as well or better. I love learning about these new features, even if I can't yet make use of them.

By Teresa

2 years ago

I like having options, so now I have a few OCR apps and will have this function available.

By Winter Roses

7 months ago

Does this work on the YouTube app?

By Brian Giles

2 months ago

After listening to this, a few questions for @Anonymouse:

  • You say over time you've learned the optimal distance to get good results. Any tips on that? The demos you did for this podcast seemed to come out perfect, like you could save the detected text as a digital document. I've rarely ever gotten a good to perfect scan, even with something like the SEEING AI document scanner.

  • VoiceOver said you were in low light, and you still got the results you did. Were you using your camera flash? I tried using mine and it said my phone needed to cool down first. The live text feature, or maybe just the camera in general, seems to be really processor intensive!

  • Since you have an iPhone pro, does the lidar scanner help at all in detecting text? Can you swita to one of the other lenses and get different results? Lol I can't figure out which lense is which, although I don't really know if the wide and telephoto ones have any benefits for us without any vision at all.

I haven't tried live text in a video yet. Yes, it would be awesome if it could work for YouTube videos, but I don't think it does. Would love to be wrong though.