Live Text is a new feature in macOS Monterey that lets you use text in an image. This is a very useful feature – for example, if you’ve ever been to a meeting or lecture and taken a picture of a whiteboard filled with written information, you can now select the text in the photo, copy it, and then paste it. it into the document.

There are many ways to use Live Text, and it’s a very time-saving production tool. Live Text is also in iOS 15 and iPad OS 15, and since you probably use the cameras on those devices a lot, you might use Live Text on your iPhone and iPad more often than on your Mac. But this fall, it’s coming to macOS Monterey and will work in the Photos app, Safari, Quick Look, and the Screenshot feature.

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

Using Live Text in Photos, Quick Look and Safari

When you look at the image, hover over the text and the text selection tool will appear. (Some apps, like Preview, require you to first switch to the text tool before you can select text.) You can then select text, copy it, and then paste it into your document. You also have to take the text from the image and drag it to another app and then drag the text as you can see in the gif below.

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Live Text does a great job with character recognition. In the above gif, you can see that Live Text was able to recognize the accent over the letter “O”. You may also notice that there are a couple of marks in the corner of the sign before the “S” in SOY; Live Text interpreted it as a bullet. Also, Live Text translated the “O” in BASURERO as “D”, but it’s hard to blame Live Text because it really does resemble the “D” in the image.

Glenn Fleischman of Macworld took a look at Live Text and compared it to other character recognition tools like PDFpen, Google Docs, and Microsoft OneNote and found that Live Text gave the best results.

Using Search

With the text selected, you can right-click, bring up the context menu, and you have the option to search for the text. (If you’re using Safari, choose Search from the third section of the context menu under Save Image and Copy Image.)

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Three search options are offered:

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

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Cardswhich searches Maps based on text and displays the location.

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Suggested websites by Siriwhich searches the web using the selected text and suggests a website for you to view.

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