WhaleRead

Name: WhaleRead
Rating: 4.0 (1 reviews)

Free, open-source book translation and bilingual reading

4.0•1 review•

43 followers

Free, open-source book translation and bilingual reading

4.0•1 review•

43 followers

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Translation

WhaleRead 1.19 is a free GPL-3.0 macOS reader for TXT, Markdown and EPUB. Read bilingually with local HY-MT2 1.8B/7B or compatible self-hosted/cloud APIs; select models separately for translation, review and Ask AI. Experimental PDF batches use a separate DGX/Linux OCR service. English/Chinese UI, Keychain credentials and explicit sending permissions. Apple Silicon, macOS 15+. Models/API usage supplied separately. Demo records 1.18.

Free

Launch tags:Languages•Artificial Intelligence•Books

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GPT-6 Astra Challenge

What became possible in your product with Astra that was not practical before?

WhaleRead

Maker

WhaleRead began as a useful Chinese-first reader with fragile language coupling and an unfinished release path. Astra raised the ambition from “add an English UI” to a verifiable, worldwide private-reading product. It audited the architecture, separated interface language, translation direction, and AI answer language into explicit boundaries, designed evidence gates for delegated implementation, and independently replayed the packaged app. That enabled 18 translation directions with native language names, live Chinese/English switching, stable answer-language behavior, bilingual TXT/Markdown/EPUB reading, human-confirmed review, and Ask AI with visible context. Astra also helped turn real on-device 7B and private 30B outputs—including their mistakes—into an honest demo using only original synthetic text. The result is a safer product and a repeatable way for a non-programmer founder to coordinate multiple models without losing the product’s architectural intent.

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2mo ago

WhaleRead

Maker

📌

Hi Product Hunt — I built WhaleRead because translating a book often destroys the experience of reading it. WhaleRead keeps the whole journey in one calm macOS workspace: import a local TXT, Markdown, or EPUB, translate it, read source and translation side by side, flag an awkward passage, review a proposed correction, and ask AI about the page without moving the whole library into a consumer cloud. For this launch I tested the same five original passages with two private model paths. The on-device 7B keeps text on the Mac and works well for everyday reading. A self-hosted 30B private model handled idioms and narrative voice more consistently, with quality that feels close to cloud-scale models while staying on infrastructure I control. I also kept the failures visible. In one English-to-Chinese passage, the 7B translated “kept her cards close” as literally holding cards to her chest. WhaleRead’s review flow surfaced the source, explanation, suggested revision, and a final human-confirmed fix. In a French test, even the 30B produced a title/body gender inconsistency. That is why review is part of the product, not a cleanup step hidden from the reader. WhaleRead 1.18 has English and Chinese interfaces, native language names, bilingual reading, EPUB preservation, resumable translation, human-confirmed review, and page-based Ask AI. GPT-6 Astra helped audit the architecture, harden language boundaries, and turn the release into a verifiable demo. This is a working macOS private beta. I would especially love feedback from multilingual readers, translators, and people who care about owning their reading data: which language pair or difficult expression should I test next?

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2mo ago

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27d ago

WhaleRead 1.19 is free and open source — please update

WhaleRead 1.19.1 is now available for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later. If you tried the 1.18 preview or 1.19.0, please update from the GitHub release.

October 6 maintenance update: 1.19.1 fixes overlapping source letters and translation in original-position reading of scanned PDFs with a hidden OCR text layer. Saved translations and the original PDF are retained; the display refreshes automatically without translating again. Untranslated passages and figures stay visible.

The application is now free and open source under GPL-3.0, with optional donations instead of paid unlocks or a subscription.

What's new in 1.19:

p/whaleread

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1mo ago

WhaleRead 1.18.1 Preview is now available to download

WhaleRead 1.18.1 Preview for Apple silicon Macs is now available to download and try.

Download: https://github.com/catlovemiaomi...

Product page and demo: https://whaleread-astra.kunyu575...

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WhaleRead

Free, open-source book translation and bilingual reading

Free, open-source book translation and bilingual reading

Forum Threads

WhaleRead 1.19 is free and open source — please update

WhaleRead 1.18.1 Preview is now available to download

Forum Threads

WhaleRead 1.19 is free and open source — please update

WhaleRead 1.18.1 Preview is now available to download

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