Microsoft Phone Link now lets users extract text from images on their Android phones

Microsoft is rolling out a new update that brings a feature that many Android users will want to take advantage of: the ability to extract text from the images stored on their phones.

The folks at Windows Latest report that the OCR (optical character recognition) is now making its way to all Windows 11 users after about one month spent in beta testing where only members of the Windows Insider Program had access to it.

Although Microsoft initially called the feature “Scan Text,” but it’s now labeled simply as “Text.” Regardless of how it’s called, it uses the same technology as the traditional OCR, so if you’d like to try it out, you’ll have to update Phone Link to the latest version (1.24052.124.0).

Unfortunately, it appears that the feature only works well with English texts. If you’re trying to extract text from other languages, you’ll notice that it’s not as accurate.

Microsoft claims that its OCR-like feature should work with multiple languages, but that seems to be false at the moment. Even so, having the ability to save text from an image in a sperate document can be invaluable sometimes, even the feature is limited to English language.

Keep in mind that you can bring up the ability to extract text from images stored on your Android phone by simply using the dedicated shortcut: Ctrl + T.