You're staring at text on your Mac screen that refuses to be selected. Maybe it's baked into a video tutorial, rendered inside a canvas element on a web page, or locked behind a non-interactive UI. The words are right there, clearly legible, but your cursor treats them like they don't exist.
The Gap Between Seeing and Selecting
macOS provides text selection in native apps and standard web content, but the modern screen is full of exceptions. Text rendered as graphics in web apps, subtitles burned into video players, code displayed in image-based documentation, terminal output in a remote desktop session — none of these respond to a normal click-and-drag. You end up retyping what's already in front of you, which is slow and error-prone.
Traditional OCR tools require you to save a file first, then import it, then process it. That workflow breaks the moment your text source is a live screen — a video call, a streaming dashboard, or an app with no export option.
Screen-Level OCR with Optic
Optic performs OCR directly on your screen. It sits in the menu bar, and when you activate it, you draw a rectangle over any visible text. The characters are recognized instantly and placed on your clipboard — no file saving, no importing, no waiting.
Any Source, One Gesture
It doesn't matter what app the text lives in. A Zoom call with a shared slide, a YouTube tutorial showing terminal commands, a Retool dashboard with non-selectable labels — if you can see it, Optic can read it. One shortcut, one drag, and the text is yours.
Built-In History
Every OCR capture is logged in the menu bar dropdown. Scroll back through previous captures to retrieve text you grabbed minutes or hours ago without scanning again.
Text-to-Speech
Need to hear the captured text rather than read it? Optic includes text-to-speech for any capture, which is useful for proofreading extracted content or for accessibility.