Gboard Launches OCR Tool For Text Scan

JAKARTA Gboard, a digital keyboard made by Google, launched an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool. The tool embedded in the form of this feature can scan the text in the image.

This Text Scan feature is placed in the Gboard capabilities section. To access the feature quickly, users only need to move the feature to the toolbar. Before the feature is used, make sure the camera permission for the Gboard is enabled.

When you want to use the Text Scan feature, users only need to click on their buttons, then point the phone at the desired object. Make sure the text can be read by the camera before clicking the photo-taking button.

After the image is taken, Gboard will highlight all the text read. If the user wants to move the text to Notes or other note apps, tap the desired text, then click the button that is displayed on the screen.

This image-taking system from Gboard is not much different from the image-taking system on Google Lens. Apparently, Gboard did add an OCR tool from the image recognition technology.

One thing that distinguishes the Text Scan feature from Google Lens is taking pictures from the device's internals. This OCR system cannot scan text from images stored in the gallery. Users must take pictures directly.

Based on the findings of 9to5google, this feature has been developed since last year and was first seen in November. Currently, the New Text Scan feature is released to the 13.9 version of the Gboard beta. It is not yet known when the feature will be launched to the public.