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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Interesting but I thought my mac already does this? Maybe just M1 and Monterey.

I was trying to debug some image the other day, upon inspection I got confused by the shadow dom doing weird stuff, but only in safari; to then realise that it was macOS converting the text in the image to text in shadow dom! ... Good/bad experience report I suppose.

ref. https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/preview/prvw625a5b2c/m...

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Macs and iPhones have been doing selectable text for a while now. Especially if you use Safari instead of Chrome. All images have selectable text since Monterey and iOS 15. It existed to a lesser extent in previous years.

Some of the features Naptha aims to do are not part of it though, like translating, removing the text from the image, and some other right click behavior. On the other hand, Apple is using this without any connection, which Napha says it is availble but with degraded quality and slower speed. Apple probably uses their optimized ML silicon, so I would imagine is is more battery efficient for using on the go.

seems in English only

The Mac built-in tool does not work on Youtube videos, which is one of my use cases for the Copyfish OCR tool. This, and the integrated translation.

Android does this too, though you have to go into the app switcher for it to work. Super useful.

It would be great if Google allowed that everywhere. Does anyone know if it's on the roadmap?

I think the extra step of going into the app switcher is not really an issue. It works for every app, and I actually like that I know whether I'm using the OCR or traditional copy/paste because OCR isn't perfect. When I copy from the app switcher I know I need to double check the results after pasting. If it just did OCR automatically all the time I'd probably be surprised after copying some text and realizing later that there was an OCR mistake in the result because I didn't realize that OCR had been used.

Yes I think you can do it in preview too.

... and on iphone/ipad

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212630

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