With iOS 16 your Camera app became a lot more powerful because it can now do Live Conversions when you’re taking a photo.

Here’s how it all works.

I’ve got here a recipe book and if I jump into the Camera app you’ll see straight away I’ve got some recipes I’m thinking about making.

But on the ingredient list I perhaps want to convert that from grams to pounds or something else – I’m not sure.

But for the demo let’s pretend I want to convert these numbers.

When I have text in the viewfinder of my Camera, I can tap on it and it’ll get a little yellow box around it.

Now this is separate from the focusing box (the square that you normally see) as this one’s more rectangular with rounded corners.

When you tap on here you can also get the Live Text button in the bottom right hand corner.

Let’s go ahead and tap on there and we’ll have a look at my 15 grams of crispy onions.

And from here, in the bottom left hand corner, we have our new conversion button.

This will work for weights, for distance, for measures – it will even do currency conversion if you’ve got a price tag on a shelf or a shop item.

When I tap onto there you can see straight away it’s converted 15 grams into different formats like ounces or pounds or kilograms.

So I’ve now learned I need 0.53 ounces of crispy onions – how helpful that’s going to be in my life!

Let’s have a quick look on the next page of my recipe book, because from here we have some cooking instructions and you can see it has two different temperatures for the oven based on whether or not it’s a fan oven or not.

Again when I tap on here I get the curved yellow box showing that I’ve selected some text.

Without even taking a photo I can press the Live Text button in the bottom corner you can now see in the bottom left corner there are two conversion buttons.

One for 200 degrees celsius and one for 220 degrees celsius – and if I tap onto them or the text that’s in the picture in the middle I’ll get my different conversions.

I’m not sure learning how to cook in Kelvins is really going to help me in the kitchen, but for the sake of the demo you get the idea.

Whilst perhaps this isn’t the most useful data to convert in my instance, imagine going to a shop in a foreign country and being able to hold your Camera up and immediately in real time getting a currency conversion to your own currency.

I wish I could go on holiday to demo this for you in person, but sadly I can’t you’ll have to make do with my cooking in Kelvins for now!