Introducing Linguin: AI Translator for Mac & iOS

Today we are officially launching Linguin — an AI-powered translation tool built around a simple premise: translation should feel like part of your workflow, not an interruption to it.

We built Linguin because we were frustrated with every translation tool that existed. Copy-pasting into web apps breaks your reading flow. Browser extensions that replace entire pages produce output that feels robotic and hard to trust. Dedicated desktop tools feel heavy and slow for quick lookups. And none of the options we tried felt like they truly understood what we were reading — they translated strings of words, not meaning.

Linguin is our answer to all of that.

What Linguin Is

Linguin is an AI translation platform available as a Mac app, iPhone app, and Chrome extension. It is designed for people who regularly encounter content in multiple languages — whether that means reading foreign news, communicating with international clients, studying a language, or browsing the web in your second language.

The paid translation styles use a modern hosted AI model tuned for contextual accuracy. The difference between context-aware translation and word-for-word substitution is most visible in sentences with ambiguous words, idiomatic expressions, or formal-to-casual register shifts. The free Standard style, meanwhile, is Google Translate — reliable for a quick lookup, without the tone control of the paid styles.

Support covers 100+ languages including all major European languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, and dozens of regional languages. For the language pairs most people encounter in daily work and browsing, the accuracy is production-ready.

The Mac App

The Linguin Mac app lives in your menu bar. Press Option+Space from anywhere on macOS and the Linguin window opens (or closes, if it’s already open) — no switching windows, no opening a browser tab.

Key features at launch:

Instant text translation. Paste any text or type it directly into Linguin and get an accurate translation in seconds. The input can be as short as a single word or, on the paid plan, as long as you need — the free plan caps translations at 500 characters.

Translation styles. Choose the free Standard style (Google Translate) for a quick baseline, or one of four paid AI-powered styles — Formal, Casual, Creative, Technical — that route through a hosted AI model for translations that actually sound natural in context.

Translation history. Every translation you run on the paid plan is saved to your account and searchable. If you translated a phrase last month and need to revisit how it was rendered, it is one search away.

A single, fixed shortcut. Option+Space is the one hotkey, hardcoded, that opens and closes the Linguin window. It is not a system-wide “select any text in any app and translate it in place” tool — you paste text into the window, same as any other translator, just one keystroke away instead of a browser tab away.

100+ language support. Full coverage of major world languages plus dozens of regional ones.

The Chrome Extension

The Linguin Chrome extension brings translation into your browser without the friction of copy-pasting into a separate site.

Full-page translation. Click the Linguin toolbar button on any foreign-language page and the entire page translates in place. Menus, headings, body text, captions — everything translates without altering the layout.

Selection translation. Highlight text on a page and right-click to translate just that selection via the context menu, without translating the whole page.

Auto-detect source language. Linguin identifies the source language automatically, so you don’t need to specify what you’re reading — just where you want it translated to.

For a full setup and usage guide, see our Chrome extension walkthrough.

The iPhone App

Translation on the go is a fundamentally different use case from translation at a desk. The Linguin iPhone app is designed for the moments when you need fast, reliable translation without fuss.

Fast text translation. Copy text from wherever you’re reading it — Safari, Mail, Notes, a messaging app — and paste it into Linguin for an instant translation. The app doesn’t hook into the iOS share sheet yet, so it’s a copy-and-paste workflow rather than a share-sheet action, but it’s quick.

Voice input and output. Dictate text instead of typing it, and have translations read back to you in a natural-sounding voice.

History sync. Translation history (on the paid plan) syncs across every device signed into your account, so your lookups from your iPhone are there the next time you open the Mac app.

Why We Built This Now

The gap between how good AI translation technology has become and how well that technology is integrated into everyday workflows has never been larger. The underlying models — the ones that do the actual language conversion — are remarkable. The products wrapping them have not kept up.

Linguin is not a new translation model. It is a product that gets the best available translation technology out of the way of your actual work. The interface should feel invisible. The translation should feel natural.

We are launching with Mac, iPhone, and Chrome because that is where our own work happens and where we have been able to build the most seamless integration. More platforms are on the roadmap.

What Is Coming Next

This release is the foundation. Here is what we are actively working on:

Continued style and voice improvements — refining the four paid AI styles and the voice input/output experience across macOS and iOS.

Broader browser support — evaluating extensions for browsers beyond Chrome and Safari.

A Safari extension bundled with the Mac app — bringing the same selection and full-page translation to Safari on macOS.

Deeper platform polish — translation history, the custom dictionary, and appearance customization staying consistent across every platform as we refine them.

Get Started

Linguin is free to get started with. Download the Mac app or install the Chrome extension, connect your iPhone, and try it on the content you actually work with every day. No credit card is required to start, and every new install includes a 3-day free trial of Premium.

We have spent a long time on this and we are proud of what we have built. We are also just getting started. If you have feedback, feature requests, or you just want to tell us how it is going, reach us at linguin@supafast.tech.

Welcome to Linguin.