Screen Search with OCR

Fluent Search's Screen Search feature can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to detect and interact with text displayed on your screen — even text that isn't normally selectable, such as text inside images, videos, screenshots, or applications that don't expose their content through accessibility APIs.

OCR analyzes the visual content of your screen and recognizes readable text from the pixels. This means Fluent Search can:

  • Find and interact with text in images, PDFs rendered as images, or screenshots
  • Detect text in applications that don't use standard Windows UI controls
  • Search for on-screen text across any application, regardless of how the text is rendered

OCR complements the standard Screen Search engines (Image Recognition and UI Automation) by adding text-based search capabilities.

Enabling OCR

  1. Open Fluent Search settings: Settings → Screen → OCR
  2. Enable Search using OCR
  3. Set your default OCR language

OCR uses the Windows built-in OCR engine, which supports multiple languages based on what's installed on your system.

Once enabled, OCR is integrated into Screen Search automatically:

  1. Activate Screen Search (default: Ctrl + M)
  2. Type text that appears on your screen — OCR matches are included in the results alongside standard UI element detection
  3. Select a match to click at that text's location on screen

You can also use OCR with the Screen search tag:

  • Type Screen + Tab → type the text you want to find on screen

OCR language settings

Setting Description Default
Default OCR language The primary language for text recognition First available system language
Add OCR language tags Creates search tags for each installed OCR language, allowing language-specific searching Off

Multi-language OCR

If you work with text in multiple languages, enable Add OCR language tags. This creates a search tag for each installed language (for example, en-US, fr-FR, ja-JP), letting you specify which language to use for a particular search:

  • ocr en-US + Tab → search using English OCR
  • ocr fr-FR + Tab → search using French OCR

Installing additional OCR languages

OCR language support depends on what's installed in Windows:

  1. Open Windows Settings → Time & Language → Language & Region
  2. Add the language you need
  3. Ensure the language's OCR feature is installed (under language options)

Once installed, the language becomes available in Fluent Search's OCR settings.

Tips

  • OCR works best with clearly rendered, reasonably sized text. Very small text, heavily stylized fonts, or low-contrast text may not be recognized reliably.
  • Combine OCR with the standard Screen Search engines (Image Recognition + UI Automation) for the most complete detection — Auto mode does this automatically.
  • OCR is especially useful in scenarios like: remote desktop sessions (where UI Automation may not work), custom-drawn application UIs, PDF viewers, and image annotations.
  • For more information on Screen Search, see Screen Search and Advanced usage.