Note-taking is a useful skill, but let’s admit it, we’ve all been in some type of time-related pinch in which it was more convenient to simply launch the Camera app and take a picture of something with text on it than it would have been to launch the Notes app and try to type out all the text verbatim. Business cards and street-side advertisements are both great examples.
Later on, you would probably find yourself glancing back at that photograph and zooming and/or panning around it to read the small text that was hopefully legible. If you wanted to type all that stuff out in a more organized note when time permits, you certainly could, but it would still be a major inconvenience.
iOS 15 aims to solve the situation above with a new feature called Live Text, but if you’re jailbroken, then you can find yourself ahead of the game with a new jailbreak tweak release dubbed NotLiveText by iOS developer XCCiao, which can recognize text in any of your photos and make it fully actionable and extractable so that you can copy and paste it somewhere else — such as the Notes app — without having to type it all out manually.
NotLiveText takes advantage of machine learning to function, and it’s capable of recognizing both complex paragraphs and simple strings of text. It can also identify phone numbers, making them actionable. With this, users can call that phone number directly from the Photos app or import it to their Contacts app.
To use NotLiveText, one would only need to tap on launch the Photos app, view a photograph with text in it, and then tap on the button at the bottom right of the screen to recognize any text in that photograph. At that point, users could copy the text or call/import any phone numbers (if relevant), as depicted in the screenshot examples above.
NotLiveText supports jailbroken iOS 14 devices and is a handy upgrade to those devices. Not only can it save time, but it demonstrates the power of technology and how it can be used to augment our cumbersome lives. If you’re interested in trying the tweak out for yourself, then you can purchase it for $1.50 from the Packix repository via your favorite package manager app.
Do you have any plans to upgrade your Photos app with machine learning-based text recognition with NotLiveText? Let us know in the comments section down below.