macOS Monterey: How to use live text and visual look up

Live Text is a new feature of macOS Monterey that lets you use text in an image. This is a feature that is quite helpful. For example, if you are ever in a meeting or lecture, and snap a picture on a whiteboard filled with written information, you can now select the text in the photo, copy it and then paste it into a document. .

There are many ways you can use the Live Text feature and it is a huge time saving production tool. Live Text is also available on iOS 15 and iPad OS 15, and you probably use the camera more often on those devices, so you can use more live text on your iPhone and iPad than on your Mac. But it is coming to MacOS Monterey this fall and works on the Photo App, Safari, Quick Look and Screenshot functions.

Here’s how live text works on MacOS Monterey on Mac. Live Text works for both M1 and Intel Macs. You can watch the video below to see how it works, or you can read the article below to get instructions on how to use it.

Using photos, quick look and live text in Safari

When you see an image, move your cursor over the text, and the text selection tool appears. (Some apps, such as previews, require you to switch to the text tool first before selecting text.) You can then select text, and you can copy and paste it into a document. You have the option to capture the text in the image and drag it to another app and then drop the text, as you can see in the GIF below.

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Live text works very well with the recognition of his character. In the GIF above, you can see that the live text is able to recognize the pronunciation on the letter “O”. You may notice that SOY has a few symbols in the corner before the “S”; Live text interpreted it as a bullet. Also, the live text translates “O” as a “D” in BASURERO, but it’s hard to blame the live text because it resembles an “D” in the picture.

Glenn Fleischmann of McWorld looked at the live text and compared it with other character recognition tools like PDFPen, Google Docs and Microsoft OneNote, and saw that the live text gave the best results.

Using Look Up

With text selection, you can right-click, bring up the relevant menu, and you have the option to search for the text. (If you use Safari, see the third section of the context menu, Save Image and Copy Image section.)

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Three look up options are offered:

Siri knowledgeWhich displays information based on the context of the selected text.

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MapsWhich makes a search on a map based on text and displays a location.

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Siri Recommended WebsiteWhich searches a web using selected text and offers a website that you can use

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