Image OCR
Image OCR does one job and does it thoroughly: turn the text sitting inside a photo into text your phone can actually read aloud. From the home screen, two buttons get you started — "Take a Photo," which opens your camera, or "Pick from Gallery," which lets you choose an existing image already saved on your device. Below these sits your Image Library, a running list of everything you've previously scanned, each entry showing when it was saved and how large the file is, with a "Clear All" option if you want to start fresh.
Once an image is captured or selected, the app shows a brief "Processing Image" step while it extracts text, with a Cancel option if you change your mind partway through. Recognition happens in two tiers: a fast, on-device pass runs first and, for clean, well-lit text, usually returns a result within moments. If that quick pass comes back empty — a common outcome with faint print, unusual fonts, or difficult angles — the reader opens anyway with an "Extended AI OCR" button available, which hands the image to a more powerful cloud-based recognition model for a second, deeper attempt. Once you've used it, that same button relabels itself "Extended OCR Done," so you always know whether you've already tried the stronger option.
The reader view keeps your extracted text front and center, with the app's shared hands-free playback controls sitting right above it, ready to read the whole passage aloud the moment you want to listen rather than scroll. A "More Options" menu, available once text has been extracted, covers everything you're likely to want to do next: save the image into your library (or remove it, if it was already saved), copy the extracted text, share the text itself, share the original image, export the whole result straight into Tech Assistant AI for follow-up questions, run it through the Text Structure Analyzer, translate it into another language, or simply close the reader.
If you leave the reader without explicitly saving an image you haven't stored before, the app pauses to ask, "Save to Library?", giving you the choice to save it, discard it, or keep reading first — a small safeguard against losing something useful by accident. And once an image is safely in your library, tapping it later opens a quick menu to reopen it, copy its OCR'd text directly, check its file details, or remove it for good.