Category: Tech Tip | Published: 2026-06-09
You are watching a training video. A slide appears on screen with a long URL, a configuration setting, a software licence key, or a list of instructions you need. The video does not have a transcript. There is no PDF to download. The presenter moves on before you finish typing.
Most people either pause and squint at the screen while typing carefully, resign themselves to watching the same few seconds repeatedly, or simply give up and try to remember as much as they can. There is a much better way, and it has been sitting inside Google Chrome the whole time.
What Google Lens Actually Does
Google Lens is an AI-powered visual recognition tool that most people associate with photographing things on their phone: identifying plants, translating menus, searching for similar products. But the desktop version built into Chrome does something that is arguably more useful for everyday work: it can read and extract text from any image displayed in your browser window, including frames from a paused video.
Under the bonnet, Google Lens uses optical character recognition technology to analyse what it sees and convert it into selectable, copyable text. That technology has become remarkably accurate, and it works just as well on a paused video frame as it does on a photograph.
The reason more people do not use it for this purpose is that it is not advertised particularly prominently. It is simply available, built directly into Chrome, with no extension to install and no account to set up.
How to Use Google Lens in Chrome
The process takes about ten seconds once you know it.
Open the video in Google Chrome and play it until you reach the frame containing the text you need. Pause the video at that point. Right-click directly on the video frame and select Search Image With Google Lens from the menu that appears. A panel will open on the right side of the browser. Select the Text option within that panel, then highlight the text you want and click Copy Text.
The copied text can then be pasted anywhere: a document, a browser address bar, a spreadsheet, a chat message, or a support ticket. The whole process is faster than typing and far more accurate for anything longer than a few words.
Where This Is Most Useful at Work
The scenarios where Google Lens saves the most time tend to involve information that is painful to type manually.
Recorded Teams meetings and webinars are a common one. If a colleague shared their screen during a meeting and referenced a specific setting, file path, or configuration option, Google Lens lets you extract that information from the recording rather than messaging them to ask again.
Online training videos are another. Software tutorials frequently show command-line instructions, configuration strings, or step-by-step settings that are long and easy to mistype. Google Lens handles all of that in one click.
Presentations and slide decks displayed via screen share are particularly good candidates. When someone presents a table of data, a list of bullet points, or a page of references, Google Lens can extract all of it accurately and quickly.
YouTube videos covering technical topics often display code snippets, error messages, or setup instructions on screen. Rather than pausing and retyping, you can pull that content directly with Google Lens.
The Alphanumeric Problem
If there is one category of on-screen text that makes manual retyping genuinely error-prone, it is long alphanumeric strings. Software licence keys, product activation codes, serial numbers, tracking IDs, configuration tokens, and similar strings are long, have no obvious pattern to aid memory, and are unforgiving of even a single character error.
Google Lens handles these especially well. Point it at a paused frame containing a licence key or serial number and it will extract the entire string cleanly. That eliminates both the frustration of careful character-by-character typing and the risk of the kind of subtle errors, confusing a zero with the letter O, or a lowercase L with the number 1, that can cause activation failures or wasted troubleshooting time.
Other Situations Worth Knowing About
Beyond videos specifically, the same Google Lens capability works on screenshots displayed in the browser, images embedded in websites, scanned documents shown as PDFs in Chrome, and any other visual content that contains text you cannot select through normal means.
This makes it particularly useful for extracting URLs from presentation screenshots shared via email or messaging apps, where the link is visible in the image but not clickable. It also works well for pulling contact details from business card images, extracting error messages shown in screenshots sent by users reporting IT problems, and capturing instructions from supplier or manufacturer guides that are only available as scanned images.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
Google Lens in Chrome works best when the text on screen is reasonably clear and large enough to read comfortably. Very small text, low-resolution video, or heavily compressed images may reduce accuracy, though the tool handles most everyday content well.
Some video platforms may restrict right-click functionality on the player itself. If that happens, taking a screenshot of the frame and opening that image in Chrome will give you the same result via the same right-click workflow.
On mobile devices, Google Lens works differently and is accessed through the Google app or the camera app rather than through Chrome, but the underlying capability is the same.
Small Tools, Real Time Savings
Google Lens is a small feature that most people walk past every day without realising it is there. But the time it saves adds up quickly, particularly in roles where training materials, recorded meetings, technical documentation, and video-based workflows are a regular part of the working day.
Tools like this are part of a broader picture of how technology, used well, can remove friction from everyday tasks. If you are interested in how your business can get more value from the tools you already have, our Managed IT page covers the support and guidance we provide to help businesses get the most from their technology.