Box any text on your screen. Read it in your language.
A little overlay that floats over whatever you're doing — a game, a manga page, an article — reads the words you point at, and shows the translation right there.
Free · unsigned build — macOS: right-click → Open the first time · Windows: "More info → Run anyway"
Why it's faster
The usual way to read a foreign line is to leave the game for Google Translate — and come back to a lost moment. Boxing the text where it sits skips the whole round-trip.
Around 7× less time per line you look up — and you never leave the game.Rough per-lookup comparison of the two workflows, not a lab measurement. With Japanese or Chinese it's often larger — you can't retype characters you don't know.
What it's for
The whole point is that you never leave what you're doing. Press a key, drag a box, keep playing.
Point at the words that stumped you — a boss's dialogue, an item description — and the translation pops up right where they sit.
Not everything is on screen. Type a word or a sentence straight into the pill and it translates it — no screenshot needed, no misreads.
When you're not using it, the pill quietly shrinks to a dim dot and stops moving, so nothing tugs at the corner of your eye. Click straight through it, and it never steals focus or pauses your game.
Flip one switch and the overlay vanishes from screen recordings and screenshots — so you can stream or capture your game with the translations there for you, but not for the video.
How you use it
From inside the game or app — no need to switch windows first.
Draw a rectangle around the text you want, the way you'd select on your desktop.
Let go, and the translation appears right where you boxed it.
Reads
It recognises these on screen and translates them into whatever you set as your language — Thai, English, and more.
A side effect: you learn
Language researchers keep finding the same thing: people pick up second-language vocabulary just by playing games and watching subtitled shows — and still remember it a week later. The more hours you put in, the more you absorb, without ever sitting down to "study".
Gloss leans into that. Star any word you look up and it's saved to your own list — vocabulary pulled straight from the games you actually play.
Grounded in research on incidental vocabulary acquisition through digital games and subtitled television.
Why it exists
I built this for myself. I got tired of pausing a game, screenshotting, and pasting into Google Translate just to understand one line — by the time I was back, the moment was gone.
So it's honest about what it is: a small, personal tool that does one thing well. It's free, and it'll stay that way for the stuff that matters.
If enough people end up using it, there might one day be a small paid option for cleaner translations and reading mixed languages at once. Not now, though — right now it's just a free tool I'm happy to share.