Are you on your phone constantly manually writing street names, email addresses or phone numbers from business cards. Now with ‘Instashot’ you can just take a picture or screenshot with your phone and tap on the relevant text & the app takes care of the rest.
Instashot lets you reuse the data in a photograph or screenshot by capturing text & numbers, passing them through some OCR APIs & sending them back so that other apps on your phone can use the data instantly. It uses “smart search” to find the story behind every image.
The app recognizes up to 99% of text in 5 different languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, German, Spanish & French. It’ll recognize & know what to do with common data, helping you out in the following user cases:
- Recognize text from a book or magazine article, which you can copy a line or paragraph at a time by tapping & share out
- Automatic detection of an address from a photo of a business card or of a street sign which will be placed in Google maps for searching
- It’ll extract a phone number & send it to your phone’s dialer
- By tapping on a song & artist reference from a screen capture of a song (for example on Spotify) you’ll be able to find the song’s lyrics
Instashot uses the Google text detection API as well as other OCR methods to offer this useful & exciting new service. Although it currently only supports Apple iOS devices, plans are in the works for supporting Android & for adding more languages to the current list of 5.
The app has been developed by Skrapit, a startup founded earlier in 2017, which has offices in Shenzhen, China & Montreal, Canada.
Click here to download Instashot on your iOS device.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Instashot
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