Nothing is transmitted, and the tool works offline once the app and the language pack have loaded, so do the first run while connected. OCR is heavier than most jobs: a few seconds per page in the background, cancellable at any point, with a guard at intake for large scans. For a stack of pages, Scan to PDF from phone is the better route — the phone camera straightens each page and sends it to your computer over an encrypted direct connection, where the PDF is assembled and OCR runs with more room. Spot-check names and figures against the page image, which is unchanged.
How it works
- Share the scan into Bindery or pick it from Files, and open OCR
- Pick the language and searchable-PDF output
- Save the result and search it in any viewer
Questions people ask
Is this different from Google Lens or Drive search?
Yes. Lens reads text on screen and Drive indexes files on Google’s servers; neither writes the words into the PDF you send to someone else. Bindery adds an invisible text layer to the file itself, on the phone, so it is searchable in any viewer on any device.
How long does it take on a phone?
Roughly a few seconds per page on a recent phone, longer on older ones, running in the background where you can cancel at any point without the job counting against your day. The first use downloads the engine and the language pack once; after that OCR works offline.
Which languages are available?
Eleven: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Hindi. Choose the document’s language before running; the engine uses the pack to resolve ambiguous shapes, and each pack loads once from Bindery the first time it is used.