Count me in. If you asked me about the OCR itself, I'd probably say "yeah, it's mostly been solved for a good decade for print books and articles, but it's unreliable enough". I somehow never considered OCR might have gone better - possibly because my main exposure was through badly OCRed book scans and a built-in OCR in some PDF reader I used at one point.
It definitely didn't occur to me that OCR works well enough on arbitrary images, and it's cheap enough compute-wise that you could do it locally in a casual fashion.
Nice thing you have there in the Apple garden. Over here in Android land, I have the opposite problem. You say:
> This can possibly be the equivalent of “you’ll always have a calculator in your pocket” but equivalent analogy to memory techniques like spaced repetition.
and all i can think of is how I recently became convinced that a Samsung flagship is losing my photos. There's been a couple cases over the past few months when I felt really damn sure I made a set of photos of something (e.g. remodeled kitchen), but when I checked on the phone, it turned out those photos don't exist, or there is maybe just one where I expected 5-10. They aren't in the gallery. They aren't in the filesystem. Poof, gone.
So either I'm getting senile in my 30s, or something is off with the way my phone stores photos. I did a web search for this the other day, there are relatively recent reports on-line complaining about the same thing, but no one has any evidence. I'm thinking about doing an experiment now (basically make extra photos every day and document them in a paper notebook, and check after half a year if the photos match the notes) - but the point of me sharing this is: I no longer trust new tech, smartphones in particular, to handle basics correctly. Much less do something advanced like reliable text search on images.
