Smart Extract is the fastest way to capture content from your iPhone screen into a working document.

How it works

  1. Mirror your iPhone or open a recorded session.
  2. Hold ⌘+Alt on a Mac, Ctrl+Alt on Windows.
  3. Drag a rectangle around whatever you want to capture.
  4. Release.

The selected region is sent to Claude, which returns formatted Markdown. The Markdown is automatically placed on your clipboard and in a result card in the sidebar.

What you get

Smart Extract preserves structure, not just text. If your iPhone screen has:

  • A table → comes back as a real Markdown table
  • A bulleted list → comes back with - bullets and proper nesting
  • Code → wrapped in triple-backticks, indentation preserved
  • A receipt or itinerary → labelled key-value pairs
  • A chart → the data behind it, as a short table

This is genuinely different from OCR. Plain OCR gives you the text but loses the structure. Smart Extract reconstructs it.

When to use Smart Extract vs Copy Text from Screen

Use Smart Extract when the content has structure you'd lose with plain text — tables, lists, code blocks.

Use Copy Text from Screen (right-click, or ⌘⇧-drag on Mac / Ctrl+Shift-drag on Windows) when you just need the raw text — a single-line error message, a name, an address. It's free and never touches your tokens. On a Mac it runs on-device via Apple Vision; on Windows it's built-in text capture.

What this costs

One AI token per drag. Drag a tiny region, drag the whole screen — same cost.

Tips

  • The Markdown lands on the clipboard ready to paste into Notion / Obsidian / VSCode / a Jira ticket / wherever.
  • If the result has an obvious mistake, hit Re-extract (↻) in the result card to spend another token retrying. The second response tends to be better when the first was off.
  • Smart Extract works on recorded sessions too — drag from any snapshot.