The Live Text or Live Text function It came with iOS 15 and has quickly become one of its most eye-catching features. With it, you point the iPhone camera at a block of text and it allows you to identify and copy it. It is a simple feature, although it goes much further and has some very interesting uses.
What is Live Text in iOS 15
live text it is a functionality that comes standard in iOS 15. With it, you can use the iPhone’s camera or a photo you’ve already taken and saved to your camera roll to copy and share text, recognize phone numbers, start writing an email, or open a website. It is a way to speed up all these actions without having to do them yourself manually.
Live text is a more advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system, as allows you to execute actions on the recognized text. In a schematic way, this is all you can do with Live Text on your iPhone:
- To select.
- Copy.
- Share.
- Check meanings.
- Translate.
- Start an email.
- Make a call.
- Send a message.
- Create a contact.
- Start a FaceTime call.
- Create a contact.
- Search in the Web.
Live Text Requirements
Like any iOS function, it has a series of requirements to be able to use it. First of all, we will need an iPhone with iOS 15. It is enough to have any version and it is not necessary to have the latest available. As for the hardware, it is essential to have an iPhone with an A12 Bionic processor.
For practical purposes, it is the iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max onwards that support Live Text. Any iPhone released in 2018 and later is supported.
Apple warns us that Live Text is only available in these languages: German, Chinese, Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese.
How to use Live Text with the iPhone camera
If you can use Live Text calmly and speed is not a priority, you can use the iPhone camera. Open it and follow these steps:
- Position the iPhone so that all the text you’re interested in is within the frame.
- A yellow box will appear around the text that your iPhone has detected.
- Click on the yellow icon next to it.
- Select the text that interests you and do one of these things: copy the text, select all, consult, translate, share.
- If it’s a phone number, email, or website, tap it to start the appropriate action.
How to use Live text with a photo already taken
You can also use Live Text on an already taken photo, which is useful if you need to take a quick picture of something that later you will not have at hand. First take the photo as you normally would, then follow these steps:
- On your iPhone, open Photos and find the photo you want to see in text.
- Click on the recognized text icon at the bottom right.
- Select the text as you would in a web or word processor.
- Copy, select, consult or perform the action you want with the text.
Uses for Live Text
Live Text can have many uses with your iPhone. Some people use it to view a restaurant menu in another language or see what one of its ingredients is. If you see a sign on the street, you can copy its text to share it with someone or search for it on Google.
There are also uses for business cards. Take a picture of them and create a new contact quickly from that person’s phone number or email. You can also copy text from documents to paste into your own Word or Pages and work with it, without having to copy it by hand.
This latest use of Live text was not expected by Apple. Because some students have used it to copy notes in class, in an act of sincere genius. Lastly, you may not be interested in this functionality, so you can disable Live text in iOS 15.
