I’ve talked about AI-powered tools that convert text into images, videos and audio. But equally useful are tools that do the opposite: generate text from images. The advantages are:
- Accessibility for visually impaired users,
- Improved search engine optimization by adding alternative text,
- Time-saving social media captions,
- Translated languages for text in images,
- Editable text from screenshots and scanned documents.
Here are my seven favorite image-to-text tools.
Accessibility and SEO
Image-to-text by Hugging Face. AI’s image understanding is useful, but new and imperfect. Hugging Face’s Image-to-Text provides short, AI-powered descriptions of an image. Upload an image and the tool describes it. Image-to-Text offers free and premium versions starting at $9 per month.
Image-to-Text provides short descriptions, such as “a young girl sitting at a table writing on a piece of paper.”
ChatPhoto is a premium iOS app that creates descriptions from photos. It includes an AI chat feature to talk about any image uploaded from a camera. Ask for words in an image or prompt it to create more detailed descriptions, Instagram captions, or product specifications. The app supports multiple languages and costs $14.99 per month for unlimited chats.
ChatPhoto creates descriptions from photos and includes an AI chat feature.
Captions for social media
Caption is a freemium phone app that creates captions for social media. Upload a photo and choose the caption style. CaptionIt then generates captions based on those settings and the photo. The tool has increased my productivity and improved my captions. The free version of CaptionIt is limited. The (much) more comprehensive Pro version costs $1.99 per month.
translation
Google Translator is a popular and free web-based tool for translating text alone or in images. The tool detects text (typed or handwritten) in any image and translates the image into the chosen language or as text alone. Translate is integrated into the Google Search app.
Google Translate can recognize and translate text (including handwritten text) in the image.
Extract text
Text extraction tools are nothing new. Many screen readers include them. But AI is increasing accuracy in accessibility, alt tags, video scripts, and more.
Nanonets The free text-from-image browser tool can convert any image into a downloadable text file in seconds (up to 30MB). The tool can also extract handwritten text, though with inconsistent results in my tests. Nanonets also offers a free Google Chrome extension.
Google Lens is a free mobile app alternative to Nanonets. It is also integrated into the search app. Allow the app to access your photos, select an image and then navigate Text > Select All > Copy Text.
Image to text converter extracts text from screenshots. It’s free and doesn’t require registration.
If the text on images becomes too much, consider extracting it and pasting it into ChatGPT for a summary.
Recap
