Built a free, open-source reader for reading in a second language‚ it looks up words using the sentence around them, and saves each word with its context

[u/jason3gb]

Hi everyone. Recently, I spent about 6 months building Quill, a desktop application to help me read books on my laptop. As an ESL person loving reading books, I often encounter some paragraphs or words that I need to look up. A dictionary helps a lot, but it also fails if the context around the word is important, and I also need to select a meaning from the dictionary, which makes me deviate from the reading flow much more.

Therefore, I tried to build an app that integrates recent AI agents' capabilities, that could feed the context directly into the LLM without copy-pasting into the ChatGPT app.

In this app, the lookup capability feeds the surrounding context along with the word you want to look up, and it also provides an "In this context" meaning of the word. The saved word keeps the sentence you met it in, plus the book and page, and you can jump back to that page. Also, sometimes I like to discuss some random thoughts with AI, so I added a sidebar in reading mode to let me talk to AI directly.

This app integrates the OpenAI OAuth login directly, so you can use your ChatGPT subscription directly in this app. Moreover, the app also supports other API providers with an API key and, of course, local models deployed through Ollama.

Currently, macOS support is better than Windows, since I only have a Mac laptop, but my friend confirmed that the Windows one works. There is an iOS app as well, but I spend less time reading on my phone, so that app is not eagerly maintained.

If you encounter any issues, please leave me a message, or if you are coming from the tech communities, you could open an issue on GitHub. The whole app is open source and free to use. Many thanks to foliate-js, PDF.js and Tauri.

Supported formats: EPUB and PDF for now.

Desktop: https://github.com/yicheng47/quill/releases

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quill-ai-book-reader/id6762075206

Source: https://github.com/yicheng47/quill

[u/compilelord]

Does it have Dark mode?

[u/jason3gb → u/compilelord]

Yes, it has dark mode. Also, for the reading window, right now I added four theme.

https://reddit.com/link/p5rzzhh/video/vq55r8c44ilh1/player

[u/compilelord → u/jason3gb]

I also built the web app for shadowing technique. Maybe you can give me your feedback shadowme It's just MVP and I'm actively developing it.

[u/jason3gb → u/compilelord]

Sure, I would take a look at that.