Windows now has the ability to copy text from images on Android smartphones via the Phone Link programme

Microsoft's new Phone Link feature now allows Android smartphone users to highlight and copy text from images on their devices and paste it onto a Windows PC.

Here's What We Know

This update, which is only available for Windows Release Preview Insider users for now, will make it easier to copy text from photos without resorting to third-party tools like Windows Snipping Tool.

Phone Link (also known as Link to Windows on mobile devices) lets you sync calls, messages, notifications and pictures from your Android smartphone to your Windows PC. Users can also display their phone's screen on the computer. On iOS devices, functionality is limited to synchronising notifications, messages and calls via Bluetooth.

The new Phone Link feature allows you to extract text directly from images in the app, eliminating the need for third-party tools. During Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta Channel) testing, the effectiveness of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology was sufficient, but compared to similar features from Samsung and Apple for extracting text from the same page of a book, showed a higher number of errors.

Perhaps the errors in text copying will be fixed in the future, but for now, when dealing with long texts, users may favour the copy and paste feature between devices by copying the text on the phone and transferring it to the computer.

Source: WindowsCentral, The Verge