New Android features we were originally planning for our 3.3 update but have now bumped up to 3.2.13 and will have out in beta by the end of the week: Screen OCR + Screen Reader. Both designed to let you instantly look up text anywhere on your Android phone via a floating button; the former using Android 5's new MediaProjection APIs to take a screenshot and OCR it, the latter using Android's Accessibility APIs to capture a copy of all of the text on the screen and present that in a reader window.
With either one you're basically tapping on a button to capture the current screen and then tapping on the place in the text you want to start reading; OCR gives you a more seamless transition but will occasionally get a character wrong, while Reader takes you a bit more out of your current context (though we're trying to match up character locations as closely as the Accessibility APIs will allow) but is more accurate.
Screen OCR will unfortunately require Android 5 or later, but will be free for anybody who owns our OCR add-on. Screen Reader will be free for everyone (even if you haven't bought a single add-on) and will theoretically work as early as Android 4.1 - we've successfully extracted text from WeChat on 4.1 at any rate - but inconsistent accessibility support in earlier Android versions (doesn't really work in the old Browser app, e.g.) may mean it's mostly useful on the latest ones. (and the green characters in OCR can be hidden, as in our other OCR modes - we're just making them visible here so you can see what the app is doing)
There's no direct equivalent to either of these APIs on iOS, but between iOS 9's integration of "Share" into the text selection menu and the new App Extension we're working on, we're going to have a much faster way to look up text on iOS shortly as well.
With either one you're basically tapping on a button to capture the current screen and then tapping on the place in the text you want to start reading; OCR gives you a more seamless transition but will occasionally get a character wrong, while Reader takes you a bit more out of your current context (though we're trying to match up character locations as closely as the Accessibility APIs will allow) but is more accurate.
Screen OCR will unfortunately require Android 5 or later, but will be free for anybody who owns our OCR add-on. Screen Reader will be free for everyone (even if you haven't bought a single add-on) and will theoretically work as early as Android 4.1 - we've successfully extracted text from WeChat on 4.1 at any rate - but inconsistent accessibility support in earlier Android versions (doesn't really work in the old Browser app, e.g.) may mean it's mostly useful on the latest ones. (and the green characters in OCR can be hidden, as in our other OCR modes - we're just making them visible here so you can see what the app is doing)
There's no direct equivalent to either of these APIs on iOS, but between iOS 9's integration of "Share" into the text selection menu and the new App Extension we're working on, we're going to have a much faster way to look up text on iOS shortly as well.
