Image to Text (OCR)

How in-browser OCR reads your image

OCR — optical character recognition — turns the shapes of letters in an image back into real, selectable text. This tool loads a trained recognition engine (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) and runs it directly on your device, so the picture is never uploaded to a server and stays completely private. Point it at a screenshot, a photo of a document, a receipt, a book page or a slide, choose the language, and it hands back the words as plain text you can edit, copy or save. On the first run for each language it downloads a trained data pack (roughly 10–15 MB) from a CDN, then caches it so the next scan in that language is fast.

Recognition is only as good as the image you feed it. It shines on clear, high-contrast material: sharp screenshots, flat scans and well-lit photos where the text is level and reasonably large. The genuinely hard cases are handwriting, low-resolution or blurry captures, skewed angles, busy backgrounds and decorative fonts — expect the odd wrong character there, which is exactly why the result lands in an editable box for a quick fix. It supports 12 languages, including non-Latin scripts like Russian (Cyrillic), Arabic, Chinese and Japanese; picking the right language matters, because the engine uses it to disambiguate similar shapes.