Internal beta account reveals new Office Lens app details

We have been hearing about the new Office Lens app since September last year, but only today has all the secrets of the Windows Phone 8.1 app been revealed, after its Windows Phone Store description become available via an Internal Beta Account.

Describing the app as “a scanner in your pocket” it reads:

Office Lens trims, enhances and makes pictures of whiteboards and docs readable, and saves them to OneNote.

Office Lens is like having a scanner in your pocket. Never miss notes on whiteboards or blackboards. Always find important documents or business cards. Don’t lose receipts or stray sticky notes again!

Scenarios:

– Capture pictures of whiteboards and share your meeting notes with co-workers.
– Make digital copies of your printed documents, business cards or posters. The text will be automatically recognized (using OCR) so you can search and edit it.
– Take pictures of menus, shopping lists, or children’s sketches so you never have to worry about forgetting or misplacing them.

Features:
– With Whiteboard mode, Office Lens trims and cleans up glares and shadows.
– With Document mode, Office Lens trims and colors them perfectly.
– Save pictures not only to your camera roll, but directly into OneNote. You can see the images across all your devices.

Note:
Office Lens requires logging in with your Microsoft Account.
Your Microsoft Account must be same as the one registered on your device.

If you cannot install this application, please visit http://aka.ms/whiteboard to find solution.

As someone who already uses they phone camera as a quick notebook, I suspect the automatic OCR will be the most valuable feature of the app, and we hope it works as well as promised.

The app can of course not be installed, but one can stare at the entry here.