This Windows shortcut lets you take text out of any image or PDF file so you can edit it later.
Some Microsoft products, like Windows 11, are getting new AI features little by little. The company aims to improve the user experience and make the operating system more efficient and powerful as the months go by.
This extends to many other projects from the tech giant, and we should keep in mind that this is just the beginning. In fact, we're going to tell you about a new AI-focused feature that most of you will love. To give you a more precise idea, it's essentially what we might call a "text extractor" that will be part of the operating system itself.
From now on, we'll be able to use the Win + Shift + S keyboard shortcut to take screenshots in Windows 11, and we'll see new options. We're telling you all this because a new "Text Extractor" option will appear soon, and it will be very useful. It's actually an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system powered by artificial intelligence.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to make copying text easier in Windows. The company's PowerToys tools included this feature two years ago. Later, the clipping tool was updated with a built-in text scanning function. But now, we don't need to use any additional applications.
We say this because the option we are describing is part of the Windows 11 screenshot toolbar, which opens using the keyboard shortcut mentioned above.
This is how the smart text extractor works in Windows 11.
It's worth noting that this new feature is gradually rolling out to computers running the latest version of the operating system. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) option in the Windows Capture toolbar is enabled by installing version 11.2508.29.0 of the Snipping Tool, available in the official Microsoft Store .
From then on, we'll be able to take advantage of all the benefits of this new capture feature. This feature uses an AI model, and when we first use it, we'll see a brief introduction describing the text extractor as an AI that scans a specific area of the screen to interact with the text.
Furthermore, we can confirm that it works with both images and PDFs containing legible characters. Its primary function is to extract text from the screen for later editing. In this way, without using external tools, we can extract text from any image or PDF file for later editing, for example, in Microsoft Word .