Not a Mac user or developer, poking at the source code because I might be interested in building a Linux equivalent. Both process on device, OwlOCR mentions Apple's algo. All conversion is done securely on-device - none of your images or files are sent to third-party services in the cloud.” Additionally, the application supports recognizing text from PDF files, images and converting the contents to plain text. “OwlOCR allows grabbing a part of the screen and having any text in that area be instantaneously recognized and copied to clipboard. Digitize images and PDFs to searchable PDFs using OCR right on your Mac.” Forget taking notes - get TextSniper to capture and save what’s important.”Ĭonsolidating into this note, OwlOCR is mentioned elsewhere in this post: TextSniper is an app that can extract text from a selected portion of your screen. “Meet lightning-fast text recognition on Mac.

It is a super convenient alternative to complicated optical character recognition tools.” As an extra feature, it can turn OCR text into speech. “TextSniper is an easy-to-use desktop Mac OCR app that can extract and recognize any non-searchable and non-editable text on your Mac's screen.

For folks looking for something like this in an app store, I think I found TextSniper here on HN last August, and it's also in the great alt app store 'SetApp' collection:

Japanese ocr for mac free