What kind of sorcery is this? (actually a very cool tip)

“the whole purpose of life has been to pass on what was learned. There is no higher purpose”

Morgan Freeman’s character explaining what to do to Lucy in the movie of that name

I focussed on this movie quote in the blog: “Our highest purpose is to share knowledge“, and whilst sometimes I aspire to focus on deep and powerful learnings to share, today simply a very cool one that can save a lot of time taking hand written or typed text and entering into a document.

It is so cool and brilliant, I rolled out a certain meme for today’s title 🙂

No doubt everyone knows this, but I just discovered the thing on google where you take a photo of a sheet of text with your phone and then immediately paste the words into a document on your computer. Mind blowing.

— Alastair McKay (@AHMcKay) November 25, 2020

Nope, I didn’t know this, but read on, Alastair then noted:

Take a photo of document. Open in google photos app. It asks if you want to copy text. Copy. It asks if you want to save on computer. Click paste on the computer and printed document is there. Just saved me retyping an old transcript.

— Alastair McKay (@AHMcKay) November 25, 2020

Yes, it is that simple:

• Take a photo on your phone
• Open the Google Photos app
• Select a photo you’ve taken of something with text on it.
• Hit the google lens button (2nd from the right on the bottom, a dot with four square corners around it)
• It will say “text found in image”, choose “Select All”
• Make sure you are logged in to your google account on the computer you want to use
• Now choose “copy to computer” and choose that computer
• On your computer, open a blank document, then simply choose paste

As the phrase goes: “mind blown!”.

Oh, and three other tips while I am on a roll.

First, one for transcribing voice to text. YouTube has a built in transcript to every video, simply click the three dots to the right under any video and you can then open the transcript, click the three vertical dots and “toggle timestamp” off, then click and drag to select the whole transcript, copy and then paste. YouTube transcripts are probably only about 60-70% accurate, but it is a great start in transcribing. Now, if you are looking to transcribe an interview (say), load it up to YouTube, set it as private, then you can use this rather than start from scratch.

Second, while I am on the subject of transcribing, for transcribing interviews I use Rev.com, at $1.25 per minute I find it is at least 90% accurate, so takes little time to make corrections with their easy online editor.

Finally, if you are looking to add subtitles to a video, I LOVE GetSubly.com , a very cool site that does one thing and does it very well (subtitle your videos via AI). I discovered Subly in April this year when I was called upon to film a series of leadership videos for an online university in the Americas. It works SO well.