Microsoft’s Office Lens for iOS now gives verbal cues to line up documents you scan

Microsoft today announced some updates to its Office Lens document scanning app for iOS.

The Immersive Reader mode, which provides a comfortable way to read the text of the documents you’ve scanned, is now included in the app, which first launched in April 2015. The reading mode lets you adjust the text’s font size and spacing and even read the text out loud. Until this point, if you wanted to use the Immersive Reader, you had to import your scanned image into Microsoft’s separate OneNote notetaking app, through which you can view documents on other devices.

But the completely new thing in Office Lens is the ability for your iOS device to give you voice commands that tell you how to position the documents in front of the camera so that they can be completely captured. The feature, which Microsoft calls Framing Guide, takes advantage of the VoiceOver accessibility tooling in iOS. You’ll need to enable VoiceOver if you want to try Frame Guide.

Microsoft, for its part, is drawing on technology it developed through its Seeing AI research, the Office team wrote in a blog post.

Box and Dropbox have both introduced mobile document scanning features in the past year.