In this tutorial, I walked through how to build a mobile app (React Native) that uses OCR (optical character recognition) powered by Google Gemini and Lovable AI — a great real-world demo of AI + UI/UX + product thinking.
🎯 Why This Matters
Users often need to extract text from images (screenshots, receipts, photos, scanned docs, etc.).
Instead of manually copying or retyping, OCR-powered apps automate that — improving user experience, reducing errors, and saving time.
Combining OCR + AI with a good UI makes this usable and accessible on mobile.
This tutorial gave a clear roadmap; here’s how I internalized it — and how you could adapt it to your own tools or projects.
🧰 What We Build — High Level
Capture or select an image (via camera or gallery)
Use AI to scan and detect text (OCR) from image
Process / clean / parse the extracted text (optional formatting, handling font issues, etc.)
Present the text in a clean UI — editable, readable, copyable
(Optional) Add extra features: save text, share/export, search within extracted text, or even convert to structured data.
💡 What I Learned & Why I Love This Approach
AI + UI/UX + product thinking = real value. It’s not just a toy project.
Rapid prototyping (thanks to AI) makes building minimum-viable solutions super-fast.
Users don’t care about how smart the AI is — they care if it solves their pain cleanly and reliably.
Building with empathy (ease-of-use, error handling, feedback) matters more than “features.”
Top comments (0)