Phone Link is a Microsoft solution that allows you to sync and cast your Android smartphone to a Windows computer. And the integration gets even better with a new update that lets you extract text from Android photos and use them directly on the PC via optical character recognition (OCR).
Phone Link, called Link to Windows on the phone side, lets you connect Android 14 devices (only select brands like Samsung, Honor, OnePlus, Realme, Oppo, and others) and use their apps through your PC.
With OCR you can now copy the text from an image in your gallery and paste it directly to your Windows 11 phone.
The text extraction feature on Windows 11 is not new: it was already part of the pre-installed Snipping Tool. The new solution simply skips a step and allows you to directly use the text from a book page, street sign or anything photographed.
The feature is currently available in Insider Preview Build 22635.3646 (Beta Channel) and should be available to everyone later this year.