Hacker News Reader

> Meanwhile Apple has been sort of lethargic.

If by lethargic you mean OCR of every single image on my computer so I can copy and paste text from anything, all running locally on the NPU on my M1 chip, then lethargic is A-OK.

That's what Apple does: they ship useful features. We'll see tomorrow if they fall in the trap and run in this race to nowhere.

View on HN

>OCR of every single image on my computer so I can copy and paste text from anything, all running locally on the NPU on my M1 chip

This functionality is baked into Windows since 10. But for some reason you need a third party program to expose it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?...

https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Text-Grab

Check out Microsoft PowerToys' TextExtractor.

I tried to use AI on (intentionally?) badly formatted bank statements for a family member. Tried Apple, Google, various startups. Nothing could do it. The easy stuff is easy (raw OCR) but the hard stuff (layout recognition and reformatting) is not yet doable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com