I’ve addressed AI-driven tools that convert text into images, video, and audio. But equally handy are tools that do the opposite: generate text from images. The benefits include:
- Accessibility for visually impaired users,
- Enhanced search engine optimization by adding alt text,
- Time-saving social media captions,
- Translated languages for text within images,
- Editable text from screenshots and scanned documents.
Here are my seven go-to image-to-text tools.
Accessibility and SEO
Hugging Face’s Image-to-Text. AI’s understanding of images is helpful but new and imperfect. Image-to-Text from Hugging Face provides short, AI-powered descriptions of an image. Upload an image, and the tool will describe 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 AI chat functionality to dialog about any image uploaded from a camera. Ask about words in a picture or prompt it to create more detailed descriptions, Instagram captions, or product specs. The app supports multiple languages and costs $14.99 per month for unlimited chats.
ChatPhoto creates descriptions from photos and includes AI chat functionality.
Social Media Captions
CaptionIt is a freemium phone app that creates captions for social media. Upload a photo and choose the caption’s style. CaptionIt will then generate captions based on those settings and the photo. The tool has increased my productivity and improved my captions. CaptionIt’s free version is limited. The (much) more robust Pro version is $1.99 per month.
Translation
Google Translate is a popular and free web-based tool to translate text alone or on images.
The tool detects text (typed or handwritten) on any image and produces that image translated into the chosen language or as text alone. Translate is built into Google’s Search app.
Google Translate can detect and translate text (even handwritten) on the image.
Extracting Text
Text extraction tools are not new. Many screen readers include them. Yet AI increases accuracy for accessibility, alt tags, video scripts, and more.
Nanonets free text-from-image browser tool can process any image in seconds — up to 30 MB — into a downloadable text file. The tool can also extract handwritten text but with inconsistent results in my testing. Nanonets also offers a free Google Chrome extension.
Google Lens is a free mobile app alternative to Nanonets. It, too, is built into the Search app. Allow the app access to your photos, choose an image, and then navigate Text > Select all > Copy text.
Image to Text Converter extracts text from screenshots. It is free and requires no registration.
For excessive text on images, consider extracting and then pasting it into ChatGPT for a summary.
