Apple's iOS 15 is now available in public beta, which means today you can try out all the most important features of iPhone this fall. This includes Live Text, the update's most technically impressive feature, which lets you extract text, email addresses, phone numbers and more from images.
ContentsWith text fieldsIn the camera appIn photosIn SafariLive Text works with both handwritten and typed text, and supports English, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Chinese Portuguese, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It's also important to remember that iOS 15 is still in beta, which means Apple could change or change how Live Text works in the coming months.
Live Text works in different ways on iOS, depending on what you're trying to use it for and where you are in the operating system. Here are all the different ways you can use it:
The most powerful – and useful – way to use Live Text is to use virtually any text field on iOS. Whether you're texting a friend, emailing, or something in the Notes app, you can add text you've copied from an image.
Once you have the text you want (see below), tap the text field (as you would when accessing the select/copy/paste context menu that exists on iOS for years) brings up an additional option:camera.
Pressing this new button brings up a smaller camera window, which you can point to any block of text. iOS will then highlight the block of text it selects, and you can drop it by simply pressing the "insert" button.
(You might want to proofread things, of course, before sending or posting - Live Text is good enough, but it's not perfect, especially when working with handwritten text.)
If you have an iPhone XS or newer, you can also use Live Text directly in the Live Camera app. Just open the Camera app and tap the live text button that appears in the corner of the viewfinder (it'll pop up pop-up when you point it at text) to enter some text which you can then copy and paste. You can also interact directly with him in the case of phone numbers, email addresses and links.
If you are viewing images containing text in the Photos app, you can select and interact with text there. It works like selecting real text anywhere else on iOS:press and hold on text in an image and you'll see the familiar blue highlights appear.
Text can also be selected directly from images on the web in Safari. To enter text, long press on an image and press the "Show Text" button, which will allow you to highlight and interact with the text here.
