A new PowerToy could make it easier than ever for Windows users to pull text from images.

The utility is called PowerOCR(Opens in a new window), which is fitting, since it’s a PowerToy that relies on optical character recognition (OCR) to function. It was created by a mechanical engineer named Joseph Finney, who says PowerOCR allows Windows users “to perform OCR anywhere on screen by selecting a rectangular region, clicking a word, or right-clicking an image file and selecting PowerOCR.”

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It’s currently in development and the initial version of PowerOCR won’t support all of those features. As of Aug. 16, the ability to invoke the utility by right-clicking an image hasn’t been implemented yet, Finney says.

Windows Central notes(Opens in a new window) that Microsoft has implemented OCR in some of its apps (the most notable example being OneNote(Opens in a new window)) but Windows doesn’t have a dedicated tool for pulling text from images.

That was also true on Mac until Apple introduced a feature called Live Text with macOS Monterey. Live Text makes it easy to retrieve text from an image and perform a variety of actions on the copied text.

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PowerOCR makes a similar—albeit more limited—tool available on Windows. There’s no word on when the PowerToy will be available, but development is ongoing, and its progress can be tracked on GitHub(Opens in a new window).

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/latest-microsoft-powertoy-to-support-copying-text-from-images-in-windows