OneDrive is getting the ability to search for words in images

An impressive feature is coming to OneDrive. Earlier this year, Office 365 and OneDrive got AI-powered search features which allowed them to recognize objects in your photos so you could search for them. Now Microsoft is rolling out an additional enhancement. Soon, OneDrive will be able to recognize words in images that you have uploaded to the cloud and it will be able to search them. The process is seamless and transparent to the end user and doesn't involve any extra actions. An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine will scan the text in your images.

The automatic detection of images that was added earlier to SharePoint and OneDrive could identify whether an image is a whiteboard, a receipt, outdoors, a business card, an X-ray and many other types. The user could also search for a certain image type.

With the recent update, any printed words in the image are automatically detected, extracted and become searchable. When the user uploads the image, its location data (if available) from a photograph (such as Oslo, Norway), and the identification and extraction of text will happen automatically.

Microsoft noted the following:

Many people complete expense reports for travel. While at a restaurant, snap a photo of the receipt. You can do this directly from the OneDrive mobile app, Office Lens mobile app, or just upload a photo you’ve taken with your device. Later on, when you go to file your expenses, you don’t have to remember where you stored it, but instead can search for something that you remember about the expense, for example ‘sushi’ or a location.

The detection of the image type right now is only in English. In the future, it will support more languages.
Source: Intelligent Search & Discovery Blog