One of the major breakthroughs in technology is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology recognizes texts embedded on images, captures it and saves it as a plain texts. There are many OCR applications on google playstore which you can use to convert your textual images to plain text. Among these applications are Camscanner , Google Keep, Office Lens, Text Fairy.and a host of others.
Converting images to texts with these applications is pretty simple and similar. Basically, it involves taking a photo shot of the text or uploading an already image from your Android device and clicking the convert button.



OCR applications have saved me a lot of stress. I remember when I had cause to quickly send my
Curriculum Vitae to a recruiting company.
Unfortunately I didn't have a copy of it in my mail and my computer was not within reach. All I did was get the hard copy of my CV, take shots of the pages and boom! I used an OCR app to convert it to text.

The accuracy of image-to-text converters is greatly determined by the quality of the image. In order to achieve a greater accuracy, it is recommended that you use pictures of high quality taken by a fairly good camera.. at least, the picture should be visible enough to be read with the naked eyes.

In this tutorial, I will show you step by step method of how to use Text Fairy app to convert and image text to a plain, editable text . Follow the steps below.

Step 1
Download and install Text Fairy from Playtore.

Step 2
Open your Text Fairy application:



If you click on "Tap here to convert text from a new image", it will open your phone camera so you can take a picture of the image you intend to convert to text.If you click on the second option- "Tap here to convert text from an existing image", you will be taken to your gallery where you will be required to choose from your stored images. For the purpose of this tutorial, I am going to take a shot of one of my blog posts and convert it to text. Move on to the next step.

Step 3
I haven taken the shot and the image is shown below.


Now I'm going to tick the Ok button as indicated by the arrow in the above image.

Step 4
Next, I will be required to crop out the particular section of the image I need to convert.


After selecting the area of the image I want to crop out, I will simply click on the convert button. I used an arrow to indicate the convert button. Refer to the above image for illustration.

Step 5
I will decide whether to scan a single column of text, scan multiple columns of text or simply Save the image unchanged. I normally choose the first option since I want one single column to be scanned. Next I will be required to choose my language. by default, the language is set to English. I will Press the OK button afterwards



Step 6
After clicking the OK button, the conversion process will begin.



When done,you will be shown several options to choose from. You can decide to share the converted text, convert it to PDF, speak text or simply copy to clipboard. You can just preview the image by pressing the Ok button


The converted image is as shown below. As you can see from the above image, the converted text is 78% accurate


To improve on the accuracy, I can take a clearer shot of the image or simply correct the errors by editing the text. Accuracy is also determined by the kind of app used for the conversion. You can try different apps until you get your desired result.