Is there an app that reads text and provides a search function?

[Irving]

Does there exist an app that allows me to point my phone camera at a block of text, then search that text for a specific word? Essentially the same as using the Ctrl F function. Alternatively, is there an application or program that will allow this feature in a downloaded pdf, or any other form of digital, but uneditable media? If there is not such an application/program, someone get to creating one and then making a lot of money. I'd do it but it's completely out of my skill set.

[Madeinhb]

If I can ask - how are are these text messages on a screen? Wouldn't reading a text to find what you need and then taking a screen shot of it be easier?

[Irving]

They aren't on a screen. I'm reading multiple page policy documents, where wording shows up in many areas of the policy. I can, and currently do just read the entire document to find what I'm looking for, but it'd save me a lot of time if I could search for a key word, locate that word in the document, and read the surrounding text to find what I'm looking for. Many legal documents discuss specific topics in more than just one section, so there is a lot of extra curricular reading that could be avoided with a search function. It might sound lazy, but time is money.

[Gman]

You're looking for an OCR app that can recognize the text from an image. There are a number of them in the Google Play Store, including Office Lens from Microsoft.

[Irving]

Thanks! All I needed was to know what to look for. I figured it was already a thing, but wasn't having any luck with my search terms. I'll spend some time looking into them.

[theGinsue]

You're looking for an OCR app that can recognize the text from an image. There are a number of them in the Google Play Store, including Office Lens from Microsoft.

Stu, just to help you along, OCR stands for Optical Character Reader.

[buffalobo]

Good on you Irving.

If you're unarmed, you are a victim

[Irving]

Stu, just to help you along, OCR stands for Optical Character Reader.

Thank you.

[TFOGGER]

Technically, it's Optical Character Recognition. There's a number of free downloadable utilities for your PC, as well as for your phone.

http://download.cnet.com/FreeOCR/3000-10743_4-10717191.html

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-free-ocr-software-tools-to-convert-your-images-into-text-nb/

[Irving]

Looks like Amazon was working on exactly what I was thinking of.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/29/aws-launches-textract-machine-learning-for-text-and-data-extraction/