Quixy toolbox is a fabulous Google Chrome Extension that can extract text from Videos and PDFs / Images on the web. Quixy intelligently processes the image and extracts the text from it using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Once this is done, you can copy-paste the text to any of your favorite word processors.
Imagine the following scenarios which we encounter all too often:
- You are watching a video of a presentation, speech etc. and are motivated by the text from the video and wish that you could copy it.
- You are searching for some text content that could be of help for your work or studies and you came across an image to serve the purpose.
- You opened a PDF file with some valuable information that you wish to copy and found that it’s a scanned document saved in PDF format.
The normal practice in all these cases will be that users will start typing the requisite text in their editor. This process is tedious and cumbersome. Quixy Toolbox is the solution to all such cases and more. It automatically does the job of extracting the text in the above cases which you can then paste in your editor and alter it further if required.
Quixy Toolbox offers excellent multilingual support too. It can detect and extract text in more than 75 languages. So you are not limited to English only.
Here is how it works:
1. Download and install the Chrome Extension from the link available at the end of this article.
2. Launch the Quixy Toolbox from the ‘Extensions’ icon at the top right of your Chrome browser.
3. Choose the language of the text that you wish to extract.
4. Click on ‘Select and area’ and draw a precise rectangle around that text you wish to extract.
5. After a couple of seconds of processing, the extracted text will be available to paste in the editor.
Cons:
Since Quixy Toolbox uses OCR, its accuracy depends on the font (script), quality and resolution of the text, etc. embedded in the video, scanned PDF etc. I found that it has slight difficulty in deciphering the text in a video if the background contains a lot of colors and patterns as is the normal case.
But when it came to scanned PDF documents, Quixy provides a near 100% accuracy.
Verdict:
Overall Quixy Toolbox is an excellent tool to extract editable text from videos and PDFs on the web. Despite the slight drawbacks of OCR in accurately recognizing the text embedded in videos, it is always better to extract text and resolve the errors in a text editor, rather than typing from scratch. The Extension does a great job in recognizing other languages too. It is really a boon for everyone who deal with a lot of content in their daily work.
Go ahead and download the Extension from this link and try it out with a variety of videos and PDFs on the Web.
