A better Anki vocabulary workflow

Reviewing in Anki is quick and almost automatic; the slow, friction-heavy half of an Anki vocabulary workflow is everything that happens before the card exists. You look the word up, copy it, go back for the sentence, switch to Anki, paste into two fields, write or paste a definition, fix the formatting, and pick a deck. Do that for every interesting word and reading turns into data entry.

So most people quietly compromise. They drop the sentence to save time, batch cards into a chore they keep postponing, or stop making cards at all — which means the words they most wanted to keep are the ones that get away. The engine was never the problem; the on-ramp was.

Capecho flips the order of the workflow. Instead of building cards after reading, you capture while reading: one shortcut on your Mac reads the word and its surrounding sentence, and the entry assembles itself — word, context, and explanation in one step, no fields to fill and no formatting to fix.

Capture runs on macOS's built-in on-device text recognition, the engine behind Live Text, and only at the moment you press the shortcut. The system returns only the recognized text — the screen image never reaches Capecho — and nothing is uploaded or runs in the background. If you would rather not grant the screen-recognition permission, a copy-and-paste mode does the same job from your clipboard.

Because the best time to get a card right is while the source is still in front of you, capture opens a preview you can edit before saving — not a silent grab you discover is wrong three reviews later. Correct a misread letter, shorten an overlong sentence, or adjust the gloss on the spot.

Two things are fixed by design and worth knowing. The captured word itself is immutable; the surfaces you edit are the context sentence and its gloss. To fix a genuine mis-capture you delete and re-capture rather than rewriting the word — which keeps each saved unit honest to what you actually read.

Every captured word keeps its original sentence plus a free, unmetered explanation — senses, part of speech, pronunciation, and a system-dictionary handoff — so the cards you eventually bring into Anki are context-rich and already understood, the kind that transfer to real reading instead of testing a single memorized pairing.

When a sentence is doing something tricky, you can pull an in-context explanation of the exact sense the word carries there. That is metered, ten a day and free (unlimited on Pro), and hitting the cap never blocks capture, the core explanation, or export — it just pauses that single feature until tomorrow.

When you want them in Anki, Capecho exports your captured cards to Anki and CSV anytime, with a target-language column so multi-language decks do not collide on import. Keep reviewing in the deck and add-on setup you have tuned over years; you are only handing off the part you dreaded — turning reading into cards.

And if you would rather not export at all, you do not have to. Saved words come back as spaced-repetition reviews fronted by your own sentence, using the same FSRS algorithm Anki offers, with a phone review companion coming so review can move off the desk. Capecho complements your Anki workflow; it never locks you out of it.