👋 Hi Product Hunt — I'm Shawn, the maker of Capecho.
I'm a native Chinese speaker and I read in English all day — but mostly in my IDE and terminal, in video subtitles, in PDFs and docs. The good vocab tools are browser extensions, so the moment I left the browser they couldn't help — and the words I met while coding or watching a talk just slipped away. Saving a word and remembering it are two different things, and where I read, I couldn't even do the saving.
So I used my Mac's on-device OCR. One shortcut reads the word — and the sentence around it — straight off any screen: dev tools, a video frame, a PDF, an image, non-selectable text. Then Capecho:
• Understands it — a clear explanation, and when you want it, what the word means in your exact sentence.
• Reviews it — spaced repetition (FSRS), each card fronted by your own sentence, so you remember the word the way you actually met it.
Capture, then echo. That's the name: Capecho.
A few principles, since I built this for myself first. The core loop is free — unlimited saved words, capture, the word explanation, your Word Book, spaced-repetition review, sync, and export. Pro covers the one part that genuinely costs per use: AI-powered in-context explanations — the word read inside your exact sentence, generated each time. As I add more compute-heavy features, those are where Pro will grow, but the everyday capture → understand → review loop stays free. It's private — OCR runs only when you press the shortcut, and you confirm every word before it saves. And it complements Anki, not replaces it — export to Anki or CSV anytime. Your words are yours.
Honest status: it's early. The Mac app — the capture half — is in beta. The Android and iOS review companion apps are already built and are currently going through the release process.
If you read outside the browser too — whether in a second language or even your native language — I'd love for you to try it and tell me what's missing. 🙏
— Shawn
Report
Capturing words from IDEs, terminals, PDFs, and subtitles is a great angle. Most vocab tools assume everything happens in the browser, but that’s not how people actually read or learn day to day.
@farrukh_butt1 Exactly. That’s the gap I’m trying to solve with Capecho — people don’t only read in browsers. Words show up in IDEs, terminals, PDFs, subtitles, docs, and everywhere else, so capture should work wherever reading actually happens.
Replies
Capecho
👋 Hi Product Hunt — I'm Shawn, the maker of Capecho.
I'm a native Chinese speaker and I read in English all day — but mostly in my IDE and terminal, in video subtitles, in PDFs and docs. The good vocab tools are browser extensions, so the moment I left the browser they couldn't help — and the words I met while coding or watching a talk just slipped away. Saving a word and remembering it are two different things, and where I read, I couldn't even do the saving.
So I used my Mac's on-device OCR. One shortcut reads the word — and the sentence around it — straight off any screen: dev tools, a video frame, a PDF, an image, non-selectable text. Then Capecho:
• Understands it — a clear explanation, and when you want it, what the word means in your exact sentence.
• Reviews it — spaced repetition (FSRS), each card fronted by your own sentence, so you remember the word the way you actually met it.
Capture, then echo. That's the name: Capecho.
A few principles, since I built this for myself first. The core loop is free — unlimited saved words, capture, the word explanation, your Word Book, spaced-repetition review, sync, and export. Pro covers the one part that genuinely costs per use: AI-powered in-context explanations — the word read inside your exact sentence, generated each time. As I add more compute-heavy features, those are where Pro will grow, but the everyday capture → understand → review loop stays free. It's private — OCR runs only when you press the shortcut, and you confirm every word before it saves. And it complements Anki, not replaces it — export to Anki or CSV anytime. Your words are yours.
Honest status: it's early. The Mac app — the capture half — is in beta. The Android and iOS review companion apps are already built and are currently going through the release process.
If you read outside the browser too — whether in a second language or even your native language — I'd love for you to try it and tell me what's missing. 🙏
— Shawn
Capturing words from IDEs, terminals, PDFs, and subtitles is a great angle. Most vocab tools assume everything happens in the browser, but that’s not how people actually read or learn day to day.
Capecho
@farrukh_butt1 Exactly. That’s the gap I’m trying to solve with Capecho — people don’t only read in browsers. Words show up in IDEs, terminals, PDFs, subtitles, docs, and everywhere else, so capture should work wherever reading actually happens.