# Yomibuddy — Read foreign books with AI > Read foreign books with AI (iPhone/iPad app by ENSHIN K.K..) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/yomibuddy/id6774872073 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [ENSHIN K.K.](https://appshunter.io/developer/1880605192) - Category: Education, Reference - Price: Free - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 17.0 · 84 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-06-10 - Data updated: 2026-09-09 - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/yomibuddy/id6774872073/reviews.md ## What is Yomibuddy? Yomibuddy turns any printed page in front of you into a tappable, translatable, AI-assisted reading experience. Photograph a page from a book, a comic, a magazine, or a sign. Yomibuddy uses Google Cloud Vision to detect every sentence on the page — including vertical Japanese (tategaki), handwritten fonts, and dense textbook layouts with furigana. Each sentence becomes a tappable region on the photo. Tap a sentence to instantly see its translation in your target language. Need more help? Open a chat thread tied to that exact sentence and ask anything — grammar breakdowns, alternate translations, cultural context, vocabulary, kanji readings. Each sentence keeps its own chat history. Highlights: • On-photo translation overlay — tap any sentence on the original page. • Powered by Google Cloud Vision OCR + your choice of frontier LLM (Gemini, Claude, or GPT) for translation and chat. • Built-in trial keys so you can start immediately, no setup required. • 20-page rolling library — captured pages and chat threads persist locally on your device. • Vertical Japanese, handwritten typography, picture books, and densely typeset textbook pages all work. • Pre-translates the whole page on capture so tapping a sentence is instant. Designed for language learners reading native-language content who want help without losing the joy of reading the original. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 0.1.6 — 2026-09-06 Version 0.1.6 — word mode understands Japanese grammar. Smarter word boundaries • Conjugated verbs and adjectives are one tappable word — 彩っている segments as 彩って + いる, and passive/causative chains (貢がされて, 変えられた) stay whole. • Compound words the analyzer used to split (ものおじ, 行き当たりばったり, 二人) are put back together, validated against the built-in dictionary. • Kansai dialect negatives (せえへん, 行かへん) are recognized as single words. Lookups that explain the grammar • Tapping a conjugated word names its form — て形, 受身形, 関西否定形 — with the reading of the exact form you tapped. • More taps resolve instantly from the built-in dictionary instead of calling the AI. Precise word taps • Tapping overlapping word highlights now always selects the word under your finger. Cropping, simplified • Corner handles grab reliably on the first touch, including at the top of the screen. • Crop and perspective tools always open showing the full image — no more auto-guesses. ### 0.1.5 — 2026-08-21 Version 0.1.5 — smarter page reading, findable library. Better vertical-text handling • Page direction detection rebuilt: mixed pages, tategaki clippings, and quoted dialogue no longer flip the layout the wrong way. Word mode refined • Words now split according to the page's reading direction, and a word that wraps across lines keeps a single colour. Cleaner sentences • Itemized lists segment as one sentence per bullet, and stray line-end fragments are spliced back into reading order. Library you can search by eye • Pages are listed text-first with a numbered thumbnail, so you can find a page by its content, not just its picture. Fixes • "Continues from previous page" now works on re-analysis. • Sharing an image into Yomibuddy always lands on the new page. • Fixed truncated translations with recent Gemini models. ### 0.1.3 — 2026-06-15 Version 0.1.3 — faster, sharper word lookup. Tap-to-look-up rebuilt • Bundled Japanese-to-Chinese dictionary (217 k entries) ships with the app. Tapping a Japanese word in 語 mode returns the reading and Chinese meaning instantly, no network call. • Every word you've looked up before is cached on-device, so repeat taps stay instant even for words outside the dictionary. • A small chip beside the translation shows "dict" or "llm" so you can tell which layer answered. • The refresh button now routes around the dictionary so you can always ask the LLM for a second opinion. Word boundaries that match reading • Word mode used to split every kanji into its own tap target — tapping ギブアップ would only ever select アップ. Now Japanese text is segmented into actual lexical words (ギブアップ, 今世, 嫁ちゃん, …) so taps land on the unit you mean. Auto-crop after analysis • Captured pages are automatically trimmed to the recognized text plus a small margin, so the overlay isn't dominated by empty margins. Toggle in Settings → Reading. Polish and fixes • First-launch default target language is derived from the device's locale instead of being hard-coded. • Settings now shows a live count of cached word lookups with a clear button when there's anything to clear. • Re-analyze no longer crashes on pages that mix scripts. ### 0.1.2 — 2026-06-13 Version 0.1.2 — share photos straight into Yomibuddy, plus a more usable overlay. Share into Yomibuddy • Yomibuddy now appears in the iOS share sheet for any image — Photos, the screenshot preview, Safari "Save Image", Files. • After sharing, open Yomibuddy and the photo flows straight into the capture screen with crop/adjust ready to go. Overlay rework • Horizontal text now fills the screen left-to-right, with a vertical scroll for taller pages — no more letterboxed black bars on the sides. • Vertical text (tategaki) fills top-to-bottom, with horizontal scroll for wider pages. • Dragging the divider scales the image to keep the active axis full, so resizing the translation panel never wastes space. • Re-analyze and 文/語 toggle moved to a dedicated action strip on the divider, alongside new previous / next page buttons that mirror the library's newest-first order. Smarter crop and adjust • Crop and Adjust now auto-position the corners around the detected page edges instead of starting flush with the photo. • Works on book photos, screen captures, and comics — anywhere a page-shaped region stands out. Direction is automatic • Removed the "Default direction" setting. The OCR pipeline now decides whether a page is horizontal or vertical from its paragraph shape, and the overlay adapts accordingly. ### 0.1.1 — 2026-06-11 Version 0.1.1 — focused on speed, polish, and giving advanced users more control. Faster everywhere • Word lookups (tap-to-define in word mode) now return in under a second on the bundled free service. • Page translations and chat replies are faster too. • A typing indicator animates while the AI is composing a reply, so you can tell something's happening even before the first character appears. LLM mode picker • Top of Settings now offers two paths: "Free bundled" (a built-in AI service we curate) or "Custom" (bring your own API keys). • In Custom mode you can pair different providers and models with each task: translation, word lookup, and chat. Faster/cheaper for high-frequency word lookups; a smarter one for chat. • Custom mode supports OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek out of the box, plus a "Custom…" field for any model id the provider supports. Library and capture • Adjustable library size — set the FIFO cap from 5 to 100 pages in Settings. • Library thumbnails now show the colored sentence outlines for analyzed pages at a glance, so you can tell processed pages from drafts. • Closing the post-capture screen now saves your photo as a draft. Tap the tile later to resume. • Cropper opens with the full image selected and translucent corner handles, so the original stays readable while you adjust. • Auto perspective correction is more conservative — it only fires when a clear document fills most of the frame, no more silently cropping multi-panel photos. Sentence + word detection • Better paragraph splitting handles line wraps and mixed quotes more robustly. • Tapping between words in word mode no longer accidentally selects the whole sentence behind them. • Repeatedly tapping the same word in word chat no longer spams duplicate prompts. Reading + chat polish • The default sentence-mode prompt is now "Word and grammar explanation" (localized) and auto-sends on first entry, matching the word-mode behavior. • A configurable cap on the very first AI reply keeps initial responses focused (sentence: source length × multiplier, with a 100-character floor; word: a fixed character count). • Source-language hint in word lookup prevents kanji from being read as Chinese when you're reading Japanese (and vice versa). ## More apps by ENSHIN K.K. - [リーチ麻雀スコア管理](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/id6759780586) All apps by ENSHIN K.K.: https://appshunter.io/developer/1880605192 --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-09.*