PixelRead turns any text on your Mac screen into something you can use. Select text directly or press ⌘⇧2 and draw a region over an image, video, PDF, website, or app. Then copy it, translate it on-device, listen with system voices, or use Apple Intelligence to summarize, rewrite, extract key details, and ask questions. OCR, translation, and AI processing stay on your Mac. Free for macOS 15.2+; Translate and AI features require macOS 26.
What's great
I keep running into text trapped in screenshots - error messages and stack traces someone drops into Slack as an image, PDFs that won't let you select text, that kind of thing. The keyboard shortcut to draw a region and get usable text back is exactly the friction I wanted gone, and knowing OCR and the AI processing all stay on-device means I don't think twice about running it over something with sensitive content in it, which I couldn't say for the browser-based OCR tools I'd tried before.
What needs improvement
Would love a way to keep a short history of recent captures - right now once I've copied or acted on a capture it's gone, and I've occasionally wanted to go back to the one from a few minutes ago without redoing the screen selection. Also curious if monospace/terminal-style text gets recognized as cleanly as regular prose, since that's usually where OCR tools struggle most.
vs Alternatives
TextSniperTextSniper does the basic capture-to-text well, but it stops there. I wanted the extra step of being able to summarize or extract key details from what I just captured without pasting it into a separate app, and having translation built into the same shortcut instead of a different tool entirely.
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PixelRead AI OCR
Congrats on the launch! Looks great, and would save a lot of time. The translation feature looks super useful too. Mainly would use OCR for converting text in images to text etc.
PixelRead AI OCR
@silvia_odwyer1 thx mate! And the best everything is offline on your mac!
Dial
"OCR, translation, and AI processing stay on your Mac" is the line that sold me - half the reason I never bothered with the built-in screenshot-to-text tools is not wanting random screen content going to a server. the actual use case I'd reach for most: pulling text out of error screenshots and stack traces that get dropped into Slack as images instead of text, so I can actually search or paste them somewhere useful. curious if extract-key-details handles messy monospace/terminal output as cleanly as regular text, since that's usually where OCR tools fall apart.