Amatsubame

The apps

Yomu読む

Manga and books from Kavita, with text recognition on manga pages and read-along audio.

Miru見る

Shows and films from Jellyfin, with Japanese subtitles you can tap.

Kiku聞く

Podcasts and audiobooks from Audiobookshelf, with transcripts from Kaku.

Hiku引く

A Safari extension: the same popup dictionary on any web page.

And Kaku (書く), a small server you can run on a machine with an NVIDIA GPU. It transcribes your Audiobookshelf podcasts and audiobooks with Whisper so Kiku can show them line by line, and can make Japanese subtitles for Miru when none exist.

How it fits together

• Your media stays on your servers. The apps stream from Kavita, Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf. Downloads for offline use happen when you ask for them, or when you turn on automatic downloads.
• One lookup everywhere. Every app uses the same dictionaries and the same popup, so a word looks the same in a manga, a subtitle, a podcast transcript or a web page.
• Anki in one tap. Cards go to your Anki through AnkiConnect, with the sentence, a picture or audio clip, and the word’s reading and pitch. Words you already know get marked as you read.
• Set up once. The first launch walks through connecting your server, choosing libraries and installing the recommended dictionaries.

The apps run on iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26. They aren’t on the App Store: you build them from source with Xcode. Getting started explains how.

The name is the Japanese for the Pacific swift, 雨燕 (amatsubame), the bird in the icons. Swifts hardly ever land.