Gboard Will Soon Let You Use Your Phone’s Camera to Quickly Insert Text

Gboard — Google’s keyboard app for smartphones — is selecting up a helpful new function that can make it simpler for you to insert textual content, utilizing your smartphone’s digital camera. The newest model of the keyboard app provides help for a brand new “Scan Text” mode that makes use of optical character recognition (OCR) expertise to recognise textual content and enter it right into a textual content discipline. An analogous function to scan and insert textual content can be accessible on iPhone fashions working on iOS 15.4 or newer variations.

An picture of the function shared on X (previously Twitter) by Mishaal Rahman exhibits how the brand new Gboard function works. Using your smartphone’s rear digital camera, Google’s keyboard app will allow you to take a picture of textual content — this generally is a doc, a display screen or an object with phrases on it — after which makes use of OCR expertise to extract the textual content and insert it into your present app.

In order for the function to work, you may want to replace the Gboard app in your Android cellphone to model 13.9, which is presently in beta. According to Rahman, customers have claimed that the function is now rolling out, however Gadgets 360 workers members had been unable to strive the function on a number of Android smartphones — so that you might need to wait till it’s formally introduced by the corporate.

When the Scan Text function is offered in your smartphone, it must be listed alongside different options like Translate, Sticker, One-handed, and Theme. The keyboard will immediate you to grant it entry to the digital camera permission, after which you’ll be able to start to use the function.

You can level your cellphone’s digital camera at some textual content and faucet on the seize button as soon as it’s contained in the half-screen viewfinder. You can then choose the textual content that’s recognised utilizing OCR and insert it in your present app — this picture is deleted after the textual content is inserted. You may transfer it to the toolbar that seems on prime of the keyboard, should you plan to use it typically.

The arrival of the function on Android comes two years after Apple introduced the same function to iOS 15.4, permitting customers to level their cellphone at textual content to add it to the Notes app and textual content fields in different apps. It lets customers routinely choose textual content utilizing their iPhone digital camera — with out capturing a picture — and shows the textual content to be inserted because it updates in real-time. 

If the function is but to be enabled in your smartphone, you may as well open the Google Lens app and level your digital camera at some textual content so as to extract textual content, copy, and paste it into one other app. Adding the function to Gboard will simplify this course of, by eliminating the necessity to open the Lens app.