Windows 11 will soon let you capture text from images on your Android phone

Phone Link (called Link to Windows on the phone side) lets you sync calls, messages, notifications and pictures – and stream your entire phone – from your Android phone to your Windows computer. It also works in a more limited way with iOS devices, which only sync notifications, messages and calls via Bluetooth.

The Windows Snipping Tool got text extraction last year, around the same time that Phone Link got image sharing notifications, so it was already possible to extract text from phone photos with the Snipping Tool. This update just saves you a step and lets you do it in the app. The feature is live on Phone Link 1.24051.91.0 and I did a quick test on Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta Channel).

In my testing, the OCR was decent, although it made more errors than Samsung or Apple’s text extractors on the same photo of a book page. For longer passages, you’ll probably be better off enabling copy and paste between devicesextracting the text from your phone and sending it that way to your PC.