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Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, my Apple devices are the first where I felt AI was integrated for something actually useful. I can just select and copy text in pictures as if it was the most normal thing. I can search pictures based on their content, again including visible text. And it runs locally. Too bad it only seems to work on the latin alphabet. With greek letters, chinese symbols etc I get nothing at best.

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> Yes, my Apple devices are the first where I felt AI was integrated for something actually useful. I can just select and copy text in pictures as if it was the most normal thing. I can search pictures based on their content, again including visible text

Apple’s so good at pushing out these kind of “little” features that immediately feel like a kind of bare minimum a system should do. Having to use a system where these two things weren’t automatic, quick, and practically flawless would feel like taking a big step back.

See also: Live Photos. I wouldn’t even consider any kind of phone or camera without that feature, now that I’ve experienced it.

[edit] context of how good it is: some days back there was a link here that went to an image with a bunch of text on it. I followed the link, read it, and did my usual compulsive-text-selection thing I do when reading on the web.

I didn’t realize I’d been looking at an image, rather than html, until I came back to the thread and read complaints about it. Double checked, yep, it was an image.

Too bad it only seems to work on the latin alphabet. With greek letters, chinese symbols etc I get nothing at best.

Works with Japanese on my MacBook Pro. I use it quite frequently.

I wonder if it has to do with languages enabled on your system?

No, I believe it only works with two or three alphabets. It’s a limitation that was documented somewhere. At least I think that was the case when first released.

Just like Siri/voice recognition I’m sure Apple will add additional scripts over time.

Here's the list, I looked it up -- 12 languages across 5 different written scripts by my count, with lots of further national variations per language:

https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#live-text-li...

Oh cool, thanks.

I tried using it to translate printed Russian text on a package once and it wouldn’t recognize the Cyrillic characters as text. YMMV

Worth trying again. I just cut and paste from a screenshot of my daughter's Chinese homework. (edit: and iPhone photo translate worked for her Chinese homework too!)

A recent iOS update greatly improved identification. It would often get the breed of our dogs wrong. Recently it was not only was more accurate, it started being able to identify both dogs in a single image, which I'd never seen before two days ago.

A Flickr contact posted a picture of an animal I'd never seen or heard of earlier today. I took a picture of my monitor, and it was able to identify it as a coati.

You're right, it works now

I was really surprised and happy to be able to take a picture of my son’s hand written Christmas list and the phone made the text selectable with very few errors.

> Yes, my Apple devices are the first

Have you had non-Apple devices?

The only Apple device I ever owned before 2022 was an iPod Nano. So yes, I kinda know the alternatives.

I mean I have these features too on my Xiaomi phone and it does work with other alphabets and chinese characters locally.

That's great, but I wanted a small phone with long update support. Xiaomi isn't bad in that regard for Android standards though.

Either way I also get that feature on the laptop, where it's more useful to me overall.

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