Phone Link (called “Link to Windows” on mobile) lets you sync calls, messages, notifications, and images, and cast your entire phone from your Android phone to your Windows computer. It also works with iOS devices in a more limited way, only syncing notifications, messages, and calls via Bluetooth.
Last year, the Windows Snipping Tool gained a text-capture feature, around the same time Phone Link received notifications for image sharing, so it was possible to use the Snipping Tool to extract text from phone photos. This update just saves you a step and allows you to do it within the app. The feature is live in Phone Link 1.24051.91.0, and I gave it a quick test in Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta channel).
In my tests, OCR performed well, although it made more errors than Samsung or Apple’s text extractors when processing the same photos of book pages. For longer paragraphs, you’re probably better off enabling cross-device copy and paste, extracting the text on your phone, and then sending it to your computer that way.
