In iOS 15 on iPhone and iPad you can now use the Live Text feature with all of your photos. This means you can Copy + Paste writing from a photo (even if it’s been hand-written!), call a phone number on a sign you’ve photographed just by tapping it and so, so much more. You can even translate text from one language to another – which is incredibly handy if you’re on holiday and aren’t familiar with the language.
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Live Text is definitely one of the coolest features in iOS and iPadOS 15.
There are some really clever things it can do, particularly with your photographs – and here are a few of them.
I’m going to open up the Photos app and straight away you’ll see that I’ve got a very natural looking (and definitely not-at-all staged!) photograph of a Post-It note with the Apple Support phone number on.
I’ve hand written this as you can tell.
But in the bottom right hand corner of that photo there’s the Live Text button.
When you tap on there, Photos will highlight any text that it can extract from the image (in this case the writing and the phone number) and yes, you guessed it, tapping on that phone number will ring Apple Support straight away.
This is really handy.
And if I swipe across to another photo (this time of a very, very long URL) on it.
Instead of using the Live Text button I can actually just tap and hold that URL and Live Text will automatically be extracted and the link will be opened for me as easily as this.
I can do that again while pressing the Live Text button first, but if you know that it’s going to find that text, and I’ve got good confidence in this new system, then you can just tap and hold on the picture and it will work automatically.
Finally on the last photo I’ve got the setup guide for my new router.
Unfortunately this page is in French and, well, I don’t speak French very well.
Luckily Live Text can help me here as well.
So I’m going to tap-and-drag over the text that it’s found to highlight it and, when I’ve highlighted that writing, I can use the pop over menu to locate translate.
And then, just like that, iOS will bring up the native Translate app and it will work out what language it is automatically and show in my native language of English.
Now I can set up my router even if I don’t speak French!
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