If you do this, say, while in Notes, you can lay the phone down and have a discussion with someone, and the conversation will be transcribed. And the words are typed out in real time. OCR and AI, like human beings, are far from perfect.Īll smartphones and tablets let you tap a little microphone, usually to the right of the keyboard, that enables you to talk instead of type. It’s essential to review these conversions before you share them. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) can convert your sloppy handwriting into text or transcribe audio into typed words. For example, if you take a photo of a business card someone hands you, that information can be imported into your Contacts. Why go through all this trouble? Once it’s in text, you can then edit the sentences, search by keyword, and share it in an email, post it to social media or save it as a document. Technology that can lift words and numbers from a photo and convert it into digital text is called OCR, which stands for optical character recognition.

Many of the solutions are free or close to it. In other instances, you’ll need to download software or visit a website. These time-saving tools are often baked right into your device, and you simply need to find and use them. If you answered yes to any of these scenarios, you could benefit from the latest apps and features - for smartphones, tablets and computers - that can do the heavy lifting for you. Do you have weeks-old scribblings from a meeting that you need to use in a report? Do you have text in an image that you would like to extract? Have an audio interview with a family member but don’t want to manually transcribe it?

Microsoft word music notes font