If you're on a Pixel 7 and upwards or the latest Samsung phones there's also circle to search by holding the home button down. The OCR works quite well including English, Russian, Arabic, Japanese and I'm sure it works on other languages too.

If you're on Android 14 you can also copy text through the recents/overview menu simply by highlighting the text. And finally there's Google Photos if you don't have any of these features.

There's also Google lens if you're trying to copy text that isn't on your screen.

You can take a screenshot. Open that image file with Chrome and then do "Search Images with Google" . There you can grab the text.

On iOS it's system wide. It's an iOS and also a macOS feature

Another neat thing is when you copy the text on your iOS device, it appears in your clipboard on Mac, so you can just paste it. (Assuming both devices are on the same wifi/local network.

And you need to select the check box somewhere in the settings app for it to work.

Source: helped a friend with the feature recently, he didn’t know it exists.