Built for vocabulary,
not data collection.
Capture is powerful, so trust is part of the product. This page is the exact data flow — what's read, what's discarded, what's kept, and what (if anything) ever leaves your device.
To turn a word — even one in a subtitle, a PDF, or other text you can't select — into something Capecho can save, it uses macOS's built-in on-device text recognition (the same OCR behind Live Text). macOS gates that pixel access behind a permission it labels Screen Recording— so the toggle has a heavy name, but Capecho never records or streams. Here is exactly how narrowly it's used.
- ·Your Mac's own text recognition runs on your device, only at that instant — never continuously, never in the background.
- ·The system hands back only the recognized text; the screen image never reaches Capecho, so there's nothing to store and nothing to upload.
- ·You review and confirm in the preview — edit the word, fix a wrong grab, remove sensitive text — and only then is anything saved.
- ·The word you save and the context sentence.
- ·Its explanation, your review history, and the small settings that go with them (learning / explanation language).
On Cloudflare, in the United States — so you can review across devices.
- ·A local cache of your words, so capture and review work offline.
- ·Nothing else from your screen is retained — only what you saved, plus the language + context metadata that rides along.
Three layers, never collapsed.
- 01
Saving syncs your sentence to your private Capecho account so you can review across devices — that's the only reason it leaves your Mac by default.
- 02
It is never added to the shared, public word-explanation cache: that explanation is built from the word alone, so your sentence is never part of what other users get.
- 03
Your sentence is sent to a third-party AI (Gemini) only when you tap the optional in-context explanation (the word as used in your sentence — free up to 10/day). We hold that provider to a strict no-training policy (your input is never used to train AI models or reused for anything else).
Your context sentences and their private in-context glosses are encrypted at rest; the rest of your library is kept privately in your account.
No background or continuous screen-reading. The screen image never reaches Capecho — the system returns only text. No third-party trackers in the capture path. Capecho isn't built around selling or mining your vocabulary.
Export anytime to Anki or CSV — never locked in. Delete your account and your encrypted context sentences and private glosses are hard-deleted within ~30 days.
Capecho still works in copy/paste mode: select and copy, then press the shortcut. Capecho reads the copied selection only after you press it (never clipboard monitoring) — a deliberate reduced mode, not a weakened fallback.
Capturing near an email, account ID, or private note? Edit or delete that text in the preview before saving — the word and context are quiet editable text.
The formal version: the full Privacy Policy and Terms.
Download Capecho for Mac.
Capture a word the moment you meet it, understand it in a popover without breaking your flow, and echo it back right before you'd forget — no deck-building, and the core loop stays free.
- On-device OCR
- Free core loop
- Anki & CSV export
Available now on Mac — the iPhone review companion is coming.