From screen to flashcard, without copy-pasting

The traditional path from a word on screen to a flashcard is a chore: look it up, copy the word, copy the sentence, switch to a flashcard app, paste both, write a definition, format the fields, and finally schedule it. Most people abandon vocabulary cards not because review is hard but because that assembly line is. Capecho's whole reason to exist is to delete that work — you capture once, and the card is already made.

It helps to be exact about what "screen to flashcard" means here, because Capecho is not a screen translator. It does not overlay a translated copy of the page or swap the text in front of you. What it does is read the single word or phrase you point at, keep the exact sentence you met it in, and explain that word — its core meaning, part of speech, distinct senses, and pronunciation, plus a handoff to the macOS system Dictionary.

So the flashcard you end up with is built around understanding, not a one-shot translation. The word stays in the language you are learning, the sentence stays intact as your context, and the explanation gives you something to actually remember rather than a substitute to glance at and forget.

Press one global shortcut while you read. Capecho uses macOS's built-in, on-device text recognition — the same engine behind Live Text — to read just the word and its surrounding sentence at that instant, returning only the recognized text — the screen image itself never reaches Capecho. Nothing runs in the background and nothing is streamed anywhere.

A preview opens that you can edit before saving: fix a mis-grabbed character, trim the sentence to the part that matters, or remove anything sensitive. Once you save, the captured word becomes a review card fronted by your own sentence — no manual fields, no formatting, no scheduling by hand. If a word isn't selectable on screen, or you'd rather not enable recognition, a copy-paste mode reads your copied selection after you press the shortcut instead.

The word explanation — meaning, part of speech, senses, pronunciation — is free and unmetered, generated once and shared from a public cache built from the word alone, so your sentence is never part of it. When you want the meaning of the word as used in your specific sentence, that in-context explanation is metered: ten a day, free, with unlimited on Pro. Hitting that daily cap never blocks capturing, saving, reviewing, or exporting — it only pauses that one optional layer until tomorrow.

Saved words come back as FSRS spaced-repetition reviews, surfaced just before you'd forget them, each card led by the sentence you captured. That review loop lives on the Mac today, and a phone companion for reviewing on the go is coming so one library follows you between desk and pocket.

If you already live in Anki, you don't have to move. Capecho exports your captured, context-rich cards to Anki and CSV anytime, with a target-language column so multi-language decks stay clean. It's a complement to the spaced-repetition tools you trust, not a replacement — it just removes the card-building friction in front of them.