Assuming your iPhone is up to date, using this hidden feature is very straightforward. First, you have to open the default Camera app and point your iPhone’s camera at some text — it can be printed on some packaging, displayed on a screen, hanging in a storefront, or anything in between. As long as the text is legible, your iPhone should automatically recognize it.
If Live Text has picked up on the words in front of the camera, you’ll see four curved yellow lines appear around the text, framing it. A new text icon will also appear in the bottom right corner of the screen — tap that and the text your iPhone picked up will be separated out into a thumbnail.
From there you can tap Select All or drag a finger over the text to manually select specific words, then copy what’s highlighted, look up definitions, or have Apple translate it for you (if it’s in another language). Of course, you can also paste the copied text into other apps, over to another connected Apple device, or into a translator.