 If you want to do optical character recognition on your Mac, did you know what that is? That is where you grab the text out of either an image, a document, or even out of a YouTube video, imagine that. Or maybe even a real life notebook or something like that. Then I've got a great little app to tell you about that can do all of that and more. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. Sometimes I don't really know where I'm going with these intros, can you tell? Today I'm gonna talk about a little application called Text Sniper. And as I say, it's something that can be used for optical character recognition to basically grab text out of not just documents, but out of images and things like that. Or maybe you're watching a YouTube video, you just want to grab some of the text on the screen that's playing at the time, you can do that. Or maybe you want to scan a document on your desk or perhaps even just your own little scrawled notes. I'm not saying you scrawl your notes, I'm sure they're very neat. I'm talking about myself here really. So maybe take that note and add it into your task manager and grab that as text. Whatever the case, Text Sniper can certainly help with that. So I'll show you how to use it and I'll show you some of the preferences and things like that, but first of all, I'm gonna tell you about how you can actually get it. Because the first way is to just simply head over to textsniper.app. And from there, you can download it and you can even try it for free as well. And the cost of it is $6.99 for one license. Or if you want to use it on up to three max, it's $9.99. However, I'm recommending that you don't use it that way or get it that way. There is a better way to get it and that is as part of the Set App Bundle. Set App is a basically you pay a one-off subscription, not a one-off, you pay a monthly subscription of $9.99. And for that, you get access to over 200 great little utility apps. And some of them also do have the iPhone counterparts as well, but the way that it works is as I say, you have a flat monthly fee. And then for that, you can basically download as many of these apps as you want. You have a sort of built-in little app store, mini app store on your Mac, which is incidentally what this is. And you can scroll through, pick out any apps you want to try, download them, try them, if you want to keep them, keep them. If you don't, you can just offload them. Or if you want to just use something occasionally, then it's a great way to just get those apps for that short amount of time that you actually need them. Whereas you might not be interested in paying for a $50 app for a one-off use. Whereas if you've got it in the Setapp bundle, you can just simply download it, use it, and then take it off your computer again. So it really is a great little collection of apps, or massive collection of apps really. And if you want to try it out, then you can obviously head over to the Setapp website, but I would recommend you use my link, which is takeonetech.io slash setapp. Because if you do that, you'll get the same one week free trial that everybody else gets. But if you sign up, you will also then get an extra month added on to your subscription. And I will also get a month added on to my subscription for you signing up. So that is how their affiliate program works. You get the same trial, but then if you sign up, we both get a free month. I highly recommend it. I have done another whole video specifically about Setapp, so I'll leave a link to that up in the top corner. And I'm also building out a playlist at the moment that is gonna be full of just all of the Setapp apps that I'm using. So anyway, let's get back to text sniper. That was a bit of an abrupt end to that music, wasn't it? I should have faded it out slowly. So text sniper, nearly tripping over my tongue, is an app that lives up in the, not even sharing my screen, I'm like, that's not very helpful. It's an app that lives up in the menu bar up here with this little sort of snipers across hairs. And it's actually activated using a shortcut key. And there are some system, there are some preferences rather for it. And some other preferences that I shall explain shortly. But for the time being, let me just demonstrate how it works because then you'll have a much better idea of what's going on when we start talking about preferences. So let me come over to another website that I've chosen at random, with no bias whatsoever. It's the Ecum Live website, what a surprise. And down here, I'm just in the section now, the manuals, which by the way, if you use Ecum Live and you haven't been down to the manuals, I highly recommend you check them out because there's loads of great information in there. And this just happens to be the page about using interview mode in Ecum Live. Now, if we wanted to capture this piece of text, for example, obviously you can highlight the text like this, but what I've done is I've taken a screenshot of it because the benefit of TextSniper is that you can use it on screenshots. So here you can see I obviously can't select this text because it is just text in an image. So let me bring this over to another little workspace over here. So now I've got this text in an image and then I'm going to bring up an empty note. This is just the notes app. And the way that TextSniper works is you press the shortcut, which is command shift two. You can obviously change these. But now I've got the little crosshairs much like you would expect to have if you were doing a screenshot on the Mac. But the difference is if I highlight this text, I get a little notification and it says there's a message just popped up saying copied to clipboard and now if I click down in my notes and press command V, it's just pasted the text. So I've just grabbed the text out of that image. It's also great if you've got some sort of like PDFs and things like that where sometimes you can't actually select the text. So this would be another great use case for that. The other thing is, as I mentioned, is actually extracting text from videos. So if I come back to this page, let's say you're watching something on YouTube. This one might be a case in point in fact. So this is just a video but it's basically anything that's on the screen. So I can just press my shortcut key, highlight this text and grab this text. And if I go back over to this document, press return and then command V. There we go. It now says interview mode, which was what was on that video. So sometimes if you're watching videos and there's text in them, it's a great way to grab those little snippets out as you're watching them either just as it's being played or just pause it. So it's basically, it can recognize text anywhere on the screen. That's what it's doing. It's that simple. But what it can do also is, it can also grab, let me get this one second. I just had to, I had to pause there for a moment because I realized I hadn't got my capture device going on my, or capture app going on my Mac, on my iPhone rather. Because what else you can do is you can click on the little sniper icon and then you can go to import from iPhone and either take a picture or scan a document. So let me go to take a photo and now what's gonna happen is it should open up on my iPhone. He says, waiting patiently. There we go. I think that was a little bit of interference because I've got this other screen capture app going. Now if I open up, here we go. So this is my phone. So now I've got a little note that I made. Make a video. What's the daisy? Make a video about tech sniper. So I'm gonna capture that. And then you get a little thing at the bottom. You can see my thumb in there. But you can also see that I've basically got something at the bottom that says use photo. So if I click use photo, it's actually just captured that text now. I'm copied it to the keyboard. So if I go back to this for a moment and I just click in here, there we go. Now that is actually copied. It's got my initials on the top. So it's tried to copy those and that is just actually embossed in the leather. So I'm surprised that it even tried to do that. You can see it's not perfect, but that is my scrolly writing. Make a video about tech sniper. It got an extra C for some reason in front of the A and then it's got my initials from my note jotter thing. So, but there you go. It has actually captured it pretty well. Make a video about tech sniper. And that was from my scrolly handwriting. The other thing that you can do is you can, if I just come down here, come to the tech sniper again. And if I go to import and I'll go to scan a document and it's gonna load up on my phone again. One second. I don't know why it's been so slow actually. Hang on a second, let me try this again. I've got a little notification that it said it cannot import the picture. The device timed out. I think that this is something to do with me running NDI-HX Capture because up until now, it has been working flawlessly. It's always the case for these things. This is gonna be another pro mouse, isn't it? This is gonna be another one of those things where I recommend something and then everyone complains about it, not working quite as it does do. So you've seen the real life here. This is, let's have a little look. Is it gonna work? I'm sure it's the NDI-HX Capture because as I say, this has been working flawlessly. Shall I try again? Shela, is it worth it? I think it is. Let me try. Scan document. Right, okay. I'm gonna try something different now. Wait a minute. What I'm gonna do is, everything's going wrong today. Filmic Pro had been offloaded off my camera for some reason. So I've got a book. I think it's the first edition, How to Win Friends and Influenced People, Dale Carnegie. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to attempt to scan, how about this, not these, how about this first page here? So I'm gonna attempt to scan this page. What I'm gonna do though is I'm going to actually turn off my screen sharing and I'm gonna turn off my NDI-HX Capture so that I'm not capturing my mobile because I'm sure that that's got something to do with it, not wanting to access the camera. It shouldn't do, but I'm sure that is something to do with it. Let's see if this works. Yeah, it's worked now. So now I can take a picture. There we go. I'm gonna say keep scan. And by the way, with scanned images, you can actually have multiple documents so you could have like scan multiple pages. And that has been copied to the clipboard. And now I'm just gonna delete this and I'm gonna paste it there. And there you go. That is the first page of How to Win Friends and Influenced People by Dale Carnegie. And it's as quick as that. So it's not perfect. You can see that there is, it didn't quite get the gaps in here. There's a space missing there, but it's pretty good. And my iPhone is not one of the latest ones either. So I'm sure on a better quality camera, it would be even better. But that is basically how it works. So you can use it on text, written text, my scrawly handwriting. You can use it on actual text in modern books and magazines, or you can use it on any text on the screen. So let's have a little look at some of the settings that you've got in here because there's a few other features as well. So I'll come over to the settings. And actually let me take you into the actual dropdown menu first. So first of all, you've got the, obviously the option to capture text. And that is just the shortcut that I told you about, command shift two. You've also got read QR or barcodes. So if you see a QR code, then that normally you would scan with your phone. Well, if you've got one of those on the screen somewhere, then you can use this to scan that. And then that'll take you to whatever it is linking to. We've already looked at the import from phone. There's another one here for, these are basically toggles either keep line breaks. So you can toggle that one on or off, either that or just obviously all the text will run continuously together. In fact, I probably should have done that when I took this one here so that it was a bit better at formatting. You can also do additive clipboard. And what that means is you can basically take a series of snapshots and then they will all be added to the clipboard so that when you paste it it will just be one big long length of text. So if you're watching a video, for example and you, as they were going through there was different pieces of text coming up all the way through the video. You could just keep capturing that as it goes through. And then when you get to the end of the video and you want all the text you just paste it all in in one go. Then you've also got a clear clipboard history. If you want to, if you've been adding stuff to the clipboard, you can delete that. But we've also got text to speech. So if I add this in and toggle that one on you can see it's now got a little tick mark next to it text to speech. Then if I come over here and activate my screen sharing again and I'm just going to hide not screen sharing my clipping I'm going to highlight this and hopefully you should hear this. Your name will be shown at the top of the host camera to change the name. Click the tiny pencil button or double click on your name. There you go. So it can actually just read what's on the screen even in an image. And obviously you can do this in the Mac with if you want to highlight text but where you haven't got a text that can be highlighted such as in an image this is a way that you can do that. One thing you can't seem to do is actually have that match the system voice. So you're just stuck with this voice which I believe that is Alex the name of the voice in the Mac. So you can't actually it doesn't match what I've got set as my Siri voice for example. So I'm not quite sure about that but you're sort of stuck with that voice I think. But anyway, the next one is the preferences obviously and quit text sniper. So this one by the way we've got one that's grayed out there which is stop speaking. So if you start it speaking and then wanted to be quiet again then that's where you do that. So I'm going to come into the preferences now and which I already had open. Here they go. So if I just bring these in here like this. So we've got three different sections to the preferences. In fact, let me just and that's a bit too, it's going to be a bit bold I was going to try and resize this in the middle of it but I won't bother. It's going to do me to failure I think. I'll just use the zoom tool here. So in the preferences we've basically got three different sections the general custom words which will come to and shortcuts which will come to afterwards. Now we've got a couple of options here to launch at login which you may or may not want to do. And then we've also got show in the menu bar to choose whether you want it to appear here or not. You've also got and by the way these are all just the default settings at the moment as I've got them but I'll show you which one I would recommend changing perhaps. Next we've got disable sound effects or disable success notifications. So you do get a little notification pop up saying that something's being copied to the clipboard. I've just left that on to be honest because it's nice to get a little visual that it has actually worked. Next is the recognition language. So this is interesting. You can change it between English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese or Chinese, simplified or traditional. So those are the languages that it will recognize. Next with the additive clipboard the additive clipboard is what I meant to say. So that was the thing where you can just keep taking little snapshots and it will add it all to the clipboard. You can set it here to basically clear automatically once you've pasted. So once you've copied all these things in and then when you go into your document and press command V to paste it then it would wipe the clipboard and start you with a fresh slate as it were. So that's what that one is. Now, incidentally this app when you install it it's another one of these ones as most of these little utilities are where it's gonna ask you to go into system preferences into the security and privacy settings and you'll have to activate a couple of the things in there but it will tell you which ones to do. And this additive clipboard thing by the way is one that I do have toggled on and that's one where it says here you'll have to add the thing to the accessibility permissions will be required for this one to be active. So that's just to be aware of. Text to speech rate. So that is the speed that it is reading back at so you can change that here. So this is by the way the only one that I've changed from the default. The next thing is custom words. So if you are using words or names or things like that that are maybe not entirely standard or different spellings of them or things like that or maybe technical words that you want it to pick up you can basically just add in all of those words here and then it will always just take that as a priority over any other spelling or anything like that. So my name with a C for example might be a good one for me to put in there so it didn't always just get Alex which even my auto correct gets my name wrong. I mean, what a slap in the face that is, nevermind. So then we've got the shortcuts and with the shortcuts we've got the global shortcut for the capture. Obviously these are all user definable but you can also do other things in here like if you just want to capture the last selection capture without line breaks, capture with line breaks. So these are things that you can toggle on and off in here if you want but you can also just have a dedicated shortcut so that it will do just that thing. We could set up a dedicated barcode shortcut for reading those barcodes or QR codes. We can have a keyboard shortcut for it to stop speaking. We can also have the additive clipboard toggled on or off with a keyboard shortcut as well. You'll note I haven't actually set these up on this machine. I've got to go through and do all of this again and then program them into my stream deck for those that I use on there and clear additive keyboard history. There's also, you can do these actually as you are taking the snapshot as well. So if I bring this back up here where it says we've got these shortcut keys so command L for keep line breaks, command H is for additive clipboard and command S is for text to speech. The way that works with these in this case is this is just when you are taking a general snapshot. So let me just take off text to speech. In this case, when you take the snapshot like this it will just take the snapshot but if when I start to take it, whoops, a bit trigger-happy there, when I press the key but before I've actually made the selection, then I can press one of those keyboard shortcuts like command S or speech and it's just popped up a notification saying speech is on and now I can just highlight something. And then it will speak that thing. So these are for specifically toggling things on or off sort of mid-process if you like. So that is in a nutshell, it. That is what it does and how it does it. And as you can see, it's a pretty simple and straightforward application to use. I would recommend checking out setup if you haven't already. So take one tech.io slash set up. If you are using set up then do let me know in the comments which other apps from there you think are great and you would like to see tutorials on because I'm slowly working my way through all the ones that I currently use but there's something there that I still haven't tried out for myself. So it's just a matter of finding the time but highly recommended. And while you're down there, obviously don't forget to leave a leave. Do you leave a like? No, you just click the button, don't you? Just go ahead, click that like button and also subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and share this with your fellow Mac users. So that's all for now but I will leave a link to the playlist over on the right hand side with all the other set up apps. So you may wanna go and check those out to see what else you could get for $9.99 a month. Have a great day, everyone. Bye-bye.