One of the innovations in the upcoming version of the Microsoft Phone Link application is a tool for capturing and copying text from photos stored on an Android smartphone synchronized with a PC. This feature has appeared in beta builds of Windows Release Preview, indicating it should become publicly available soon.
Phone Link’s Existing Features and Recent Updates
The Phone Link application allows you to synchronize calls, messages, notifications, and images, and even broadcast what’s happening on the screen of a user’s Android smartphone in Windows. The iOS version of the product offers fewer features, but it can still sync notifications, calls, and messages via Bluetooth.
Last year, the Snipping app on Windows added the ability to extract text from images. This means that Windows device users can still extract and copy text from photos. However, the introduction of this function in Phone Link will save time since it will be possible to copy text directly from photos stored in the device’s memory, without needing to use Snipping.
Current Performance and Future Improvements
At this stage, Phone Link’s image text extraction tool reportedly doesn’t work as well as its Samsung or Apple counterparts, but it’s likely to be improved over time, notes NIX Solutions. The new feature is implemented in Phone Link 1.24051.91.0. When exactly it will become publicly available is still unknown, but we’ll keep you updated.