Microsoft is looking to expand its smartphone connectivity with Android phones thanks to a new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature coming to Phone Link in the near future. Basically, the new feature will let you select text from photos synced from your Android phone to your Windows PC. If you're a Phone Link user, this could be a significant upgrade, and if you're not, this might convince you to try the feature when it launches.
It's worth noting, however, that most Android phones (and Apple devices) nowadays have OCR, so you don't need to sync your photos with your PC if you want to extract text from them. In fact, according to testing from The Verge, the phone's built-in OCR actually worked better than the one in Windows.
The feature is currently in beta, so it could get better when it launches to all Windows and Android users. For now, anyone who's part of the Release Preview Insider builds can give the new OCR Phone Link feature a shot and see how it works for them. The biggest convenience I can see is the ability to select text using a mouse and keyboard instead of a touchscreen.
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