Download Playto Lite: Game Screen Translator

About This Software

Learn languages through the games you love. Playto reads the on-screen text of any PC game with local AI and shows the meaning right there as a translation overlay — JRPGs, visual novels, strategy games, anything with text on screen.

There's no fiddly setup that gets between you and the game. Pick how it reads to fit how you play: keep a fixed region in view, follow your mouse, read the whole screen, or show a translation only when you ask. Save the words and sentences you care about to your Word Book, and the ones you register quickly become study material — flashcards and more — that deepen your grasp of the game. This is immersion learning: play with Playto, and the words you run into again and again start to make sense without stopping to look them up.

Translate any spot you point at — dialogue or UI

Cursor-follow mode reads the text wherever you point your mouse — dialogue, menus, item descriptions. Fixed-region mode watches a set area such as subtitles or a status bar. Window mode (beta) translates the whole screen in the background and shows the overlay only when you want it. Whatever the game, you read any spot you like — not just subtitles. Captured text appears as an overlay with the original and its meaning, without pausing the game.

After playing, grow your Word Book

When you stop playing, a session summary lets you look back over the text you met today. Nothing is saved automatically — only the words and sentences you choose to keep enter your Word Book. So your Word Book becomes a learning record you selected yourself.

Keep the scenes you played, in an album

The screen as you saw it, the original text, and its meaning. Look back after you play, and keep the scenes in your album.

Make it stick with review and quizzes

Saved items go into SRS (spaced repetition) timed to the forgetting curve, and 8 quiz modes turn them into lasting memory. The more you play, the more your own dictionary grows — as wide as the games you've played.

From reading the screen to logging every line

Playto's work goes well beyond the translation itself. Playto reads the screen three ways, and you pick which one fits the game. Text runs OCR alone — the fastest and lightest. Text+ runs OCR with AI vision behind it, and applies your glossary and context. Image hands the whole screen to a vision model that reads the picture itself: stylized fonts, brush calligraphy, vertical Japanese text, and lettering painted into a texture are read this way — and it picks up who is speaking and adjusts the tone to the scene. Playto then sorts what it read into dialogue, menus, and item descriptions and breaks it into units a language model can translate cleanly. The meanings are produced by a local LLM running on your own PC — you choose which model to run, and you can change it whenever you like. And every translation that appears on screen is kept in a log you can read back after you play. A per-game glossary pins character names and terms the way you want them.

Key features

• Real-time translation overlay — Reads on-screen text and shows the original together with its meaning, without pausing the game and without Alt-Tab.

• Capture modes — Cursor-follow works like a mouse tooltip translator, reading wherever you point — dialogue, item tooltips, menus, UI labels. Fixed-region watches a set area; window mode (beta) translates the whole screen in the background. Read any spot you like.

• Automatic log — Everything you encounter is recorded. Look back anytime during play to check meanings or pronunciation.

• Word Book + SRS + 8 quiz modes — Save the words and sentences you want to remember, and make them stick with spaced repetition and quizzes (Flashcard, Multiple Choice, Fill Blank, Dictation, and more).

• Album — Save captured scenes as full images with their translation, to look back on memorable moments anytime.

• Anki export — Take your study out of Playto: export your Word Book as a TSV file, or package Album scenes with their images as an Anki deck (.apkg) for spaced-repetition review anywhere. A natural fit for sentence mining.

• Three reading modes — Text for OCR-only speed, Text+ for everyday play (glossary and context aware), and Image, where a local vision model reads the screen itself: stylized fonts, brush and fantasy lettering, vertical Japanese writing, and text painted into textures, plus speaker and scene awareness. Switch any time.

• Per-game glossary — Register character names and custom terms, and they're reflected in that game's translations.

• Fully local — Translation runs on your own PC, works offline while you play, and the text on your screen is never sent anywhere. Supported languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese.

Before you start

• Try Playto Lite first — Local AI needs GPU VRAM in addition to your game (typically 2–4 GB extra). Playto Lite is the free version — please confirm compatibility before purchasing.

• Text-to-speech — Hear captured sentences read aloud. Available for these languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

• How translation works — Word meanings come from a dictionary. Sentences are translated by the local LLM you choose, shown alongside the original so you always have the real text in front of you.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Playto uses AI models (LLMs) to generate real-time translations of on-screen game text. All AI processing runs entirely on your machine using local models — no data is sent to external servers. The AI is also used for OCR (optical character recognition) to read text from game screens. No pre-generated AI content is included; all translations are generated live during use.