Awnsy
Pricing
- Free Tier
- Free version with limited screen translation; Pro unlocks unlimited
Summary
PDF subtitles, game UI text, scanned images — anything that blocks your cursor from selecting it has historically meant alt-tabbing to a separate app and retyping by hand. Awnsy solves that by translating whatever is on your screen, selected or not, with a double keystroke.
The core workflow is a double-tap of ⌘C or a custom hotkey: Awnsy captures the screen region you draw, runs on-device OCR to pull text from images, videos, or locked interfaces, and streams a translation back inline. The built-in model runs entirely on-device — no account, no API key, no network call required — which means translations work offline and nothing leaves the machine. Teams that need higher translation quality can bring their own OpenAI or Anthropic key; the credential lives in the macOS Keychain. The free tier caps screen translation volume, and unlimited captures require a paid upgrade. The tool requires macOS 15 and Apple silicon, which immediately rules it out for Intel Macs and any non-Mac workflow.
Bottom line: This fits a solo macOS user or privacy-sensitive researcher who needs to translate non-selectable text on Apple silicon — it does not fit teams needing cross-platform deployment, API access for integration, or bulk document pipelines.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- On-device OCR extracts text from images, video frames, and locked app interfaces, so you are not blocked by content that refuses cursor selection.
- The built-in translation model runs fully offline with no account or API key required, which means sensitive documents stay on the machine and translations work without a network connection.
- Optional OpenAI or Anthropic key support routes requests to higher-quality cloud models when accuracy matters more than privacy, with the credential stored in the macOS Keychain rather than any third-party server.
- Pure Swift implementation and menu-bar-only presence avoids the memory overhead of Electron-based alternatives, so the tool does not compete with your other applications for resources.
- Hotkey-driven capture — double-⌘C or a custom binding — means the full workflow from trigger to translated output requires no mouse navigation through menus, which matters when translating time-sensitive content like subtitles mid-playback.
Cons
Sign in to edit- Unlimited screen translation is a paid-only feature, so teams evaluating the tool for regular production use hit the free tier's cap during testing and must commit before understanding the full cost profile.
- The app requires macOS 15 and Apple silicon, which means any Intel Mac in the fleet is excluded entirely — teams with mixed hardware have to maintain two different solutions.
- There is no API, no webhook, and no integration surface of any kind, so any workflow that involves translating content programmatically or piping results into another tool cannot use Awnsy; those teams switch to a cloud translation API with an SDK.
- On-device model quality has a ceiling below cloud frontier models — for legal, medical, or nuanced literary translation where accuracy is non-negotiable, users depend on bringing their own OpenAI or Anthropic key, which reintroduces the cloud dependency the tool is positioned to avoid.
About
- Platforms
- macOS 15 or later (Apple silicon)
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- No
- Last Updated
- 2026-09-21T08:48:14.863Z
Best For
Who it's for
- macOS users needing screen-wide translation
- Privacy-focused individuals avoiding cloud uploads
- Users preferring hotkey-driven workflows
- Apple silicon Mac owners on macOS 15+
What it does well
- Translating text from images, PDFs, and videos
- Quick translations in games or non-selectable apps
- Offline private translations without cloud services
- Instant screen captures and subtitle translations
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Sign Up to ContributeFrequently Asked Questions
- Is Awnsy free?
- Awnsy has a permanent free tier alongside paid upgrades. You can keep using a baseline version indefinitely without paying.
- Is Awnsy open source?
- No — Awnsy is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- What platforms does Awnsy support?
- Awnsy is available on: macOS 15 or later (Apple silicon).
Curated lists that include this category
Awnsy is a macOS menu-bar app that translates text from any screen region, including content you cannot select with a cursor. The workflow is: press a double-⌘C hotkey (or a custom binding), draw a capture box around whatever you want translated — an image, a running video, a game interface, a PDF rendered in a viewer — and the translation streams into a floating window. You can switch target language or model within that same window without reopening anything.
The differentiating feature is on-device text recognition combined with a fully local translation model. The vendor states the built-in model runs offline with no account, no API key, and no telemetry, which means the text in that screenshot of a confidential document never touches an external server. For users who want higher output quality, an OpenAI or Anthropic key can be added and is stored in the macOS Keychain rather than any vendor-side storage.
The tool is written in Swift rather than Electron, so it lives in the menu bar without a persistent Dock presence and carries a smaller memory footprint than browser-based alternatives. That architecture choice also means it is native only — there is no web interface, no API endpoint for other tools to call, and no Windows or Linux version. The unlimited screen translation capability is a paid-only feature; the free tier is capped. macOS 15 and Apple silicon are hard requirements, not soft recommendations.
Awns fits a specific profile: a solo user or small team on Apple silicon who regularly encounters non-selectable text in games, research PDFs, or foreign-language video, and who wants that workflow to stay offline and private. It does not fit any scenario requiring programmatic access, cross-platform use, or volume batch translation of documents.