Reading Buddy

Basic functionality

After logging in, you can create projects, which would ideally correspond to a single text you are reading. When creating a project, you specify title, description, source (original) language and target language. Filling out the description properly will allow the grammatical analysis, translations and chat to optimize responses better (e.g. targeting the responses at the specific type of work or genre).

After you create a project, you can add segments to it, i.e. pieces of text. You initially enter text of the segment. If you prefer to use OCR capacity to read an image of text, please input a placeholder text here; you can use OCR once the segment is created and you enter into the segment editing panel.

In the segment editing panel, you can modify the text of the segment, input text of the segment via an image of text, analyse grammar of the text, translate it into the target language, and chat about it.

Translation of the text can be performed either by Google Translate API or by a large language model. Supported large language models: GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.5. You can change the model from the segment editing view. Feel free to experiment with these!

Ideally, it is best to generate grammatical analysis of the text before generating translation. If you generate translation through a large language model, the model has access to grammatical analysis and project description and can optimize for them.

If you have special instructions on how to perform grammatical analysis or translation for the given project, please input them in the project description. The language model will have access to it and can optimize the analyses and translations based on these instructions.

Chat has access to the project description and segment information (grammatical analysis, original text, and translation), but not to other segments in the project. I plan to introduce the ability of the chat to refer to other segments within the project in one of the future versions.

You can add notes to the project. It is handy if e.g. you have access to published translation and want to store it along with your translation of the segment.

You can add annotations to the original text, translation, grammatical analysis and notes. Annotations are displayed at the bottom of the page. You can also colour-code annotations for different categories.

Collaboration functionality

Reading Buddy has basic collaboration functionality. You can invite other users of the application to 'friends' list by inputting the email they used to log in to the application. You can also share projects with them.

When sharing projects with collaborators, you can select two roles to grant them: annotator or editor. Annotators can access the project, but can't edit anything. They can, however, add annotations. Editors can edit all project data.