An exciting new feature is coming to Windows that will revolutionize how you interact with text in your Android photos. Microsoft Phone Link is introducing a feature that allows users to select and copy text directly from images synced from their Android phones. This feature is currently available in Release Preview Insider builds and is expected to be rolled out to all users soon.

Phone Link, also known as Link to Windows on the phone side, already offers the capability to sync calls, messages, notifications, and images, as well as mirror your Android phone screen on your Windows computer. While it also has limited functionality with iOS devices, allowing for the syncing of notifications, messages, and calls via Bluetooth, the new text extraction feature is specifically tailored for Android users.

Previously, users could use the Windows Snipping Tool to extract text from images, but this new update streamlines the process by enabling text extraction directly within the Phone Link app. This enhancement eliminates the need for additional steps and allows for seamless text selection and copying within the app itself. The feature is currently live in Phone Link version 1.24051.91.0 and has been tested in Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta Channel).

During testing, the optical character recognition (OCR) performance was found to be decent, although it exhibited more errors compared to similar functionalities on Samsung or Apple devices when extracting text from the same image of a book page. For longer passages, users may find it more efficient to utilize cross-device copy and paste, extract the text on their phone, and transfer it to their PC via that method.