Office Lens Brings Optical Character Recognition To Windows Phone

Earlier today Microsoft released OneNote for Mac, and it also made its popular note-taking application free for all. With the app, it was also rumored that the company would launch Office Lens, an app that brings optical character recognition to Windows Phone. Sure enough, Office Lens is out today, and it lets users convert photographs of text into editable text format right on their Windows Phone devices.

Office Lens is essentially a camera application, since the idea is to take a picture of an object with text on it. It could be anything, such as business cards, printed documents or whiteboards. The app has three modes, photos, document and whiteboard, to suit each scenario. Once a picture is taken, the text is transcribed and saved automatically to the OneNote app.

The app requires users to log in with a Microsoft Account, the one that is associated with that particular Windows Phone device. This ties up everything nicely, as saved data automatically gets added to OneNote, which syncs it across all platforms on which Microsoft’s note-taking application is being used. Office Lens for Windows Phone is live now and available for download through the Windows Phone Store. Just like OneNote, Office Lens too is available for free.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Microsoft, Windows Phone