Poe - Yomitan for Android

Poe - Yomitan for Android
Photo by Dhruv / Unsplash

I've been playing with Poe recently:

Poe: Language Lens - Apps on Google Play
Pop-up dictionary and language learning tool for Japanese, Chinese, and more.

This is Yomitan for Androids but anywhere on the screen.

It's really easy to install. You just have to:

  1. Install via Google Play
  2. Open the app
  3. Click "Enable"
  4. It'll take you to the Android accessibility settings, add Poe as an allowed app.
  5. Done 🥳

Good

  • It lets you look up words anywhere on your Android screen using OCR
  • It works exactly like Yomitan etc does, just hover and you can see a words definition
  • It has pitch accent
  • It's the only thing that works this simply on Android

Bad

  • There is an $10 a month subscription for better OCR / Anki support
  • The OCR is kinda slow if you don't pay $10 a month
  • No custom dictionaries

Actually I have no clue what dictionary is used lol. For sure there is no proper noun / name dictionary though.

I got this to help me understand complicated place names as I live in Japan and Google Maps is hard here if you don't know Kanji

I don't know why they only have a singular dictionary

  • Instead of promising to add more dictionaries, they plan to add AI definitions of words.

Conclusion

May as well get it. It's free, it's the only app that does this with such an easy install (no termux etc needed).

if you are a developer please build something that works just as easily but is more like yomitan thanks :)