The FluentWith browser extension translates any word or sentence into your native language, looks up definitions, and explains tricky lines on-device with Chrome AI. On YouTube, click any word in a caption to look it up — the video pauses around the popover. Save what's worth practicing and it flows straight into spaced-repetition flashcards and AI speaking drills.
Works with Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc · Chrome 120+ · Explain needs Chrome 138+
Highlight a single word or a full sentence on any English webpage. The chip translates into your native language (Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian) — direct from your browser to the translation service. We never see the request.
On YouTube, click any word inside a caption to look it up — the video pauses, the popover opens. A small AI icon at the top-right of the caption translates or explains the whole line. Saved captions link back to the exact frame so you can replay the moment you learned the word.
Optional: save a word to your FluentWith library and it automatically becomes a spaced-repetition flashcard and shows up in AI speaking drills. The vocabulary you actually encountered ends up in your speech — not stuck in a forgotten list.
Translation goes direct from your browser to MyMemory. Look-ups go direct to the Free Dictionary API. Explain prefers Chrome's built-in on-device AI (Chrome 138+) — when your browser supports it, nothing leaves your computer; otherwise, if you're signed into FluentWith, Explain falls back to our server. Only the Save action and the Explain fallback ever talk to FluentWith, and only when you ask for them. No analytics, no tracking, no remote code. Source is publicly readable on GitHub (MIT licence).
Most English learners read more English than they speak — articles, Reddit, work emails, documentation, captions, news. Every day, dozens of unfamiliar words and phrases pass through, and almost all of them slip away. You see contingent, you sort of get it from context, you keep reading, and a week later you couldn't use it in a sentence. The FluentWith extension is built around two ideas: make it trivial to understand any English you meet, and make it trivial to keep the words that matter.
Translate handles whole sentences, not just words. Most dictionary extensions stop at the headword, which is fine if you just want a definition but useless when an entire line is confusing. Highlight a sentence on any page and the chip translates it into your native language — Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, or Russian today, with more on the way. The Explain tab takes the same input and rewrites it in plain English. When your browser supports Chrome's built-in Prompt API (Chrome 138+), the explanation is generated entirely on-device — nothing leaves your computer, so there are no rate limits and no privacy trade-off. When your browser doesn't support on-device AI and you're signed into FluentWith, Explain falls back to a server-side model so the feature still works; if you're not signed in, the Explain tab is hidden silently rather than quietly sending text to our servers.
The YouTube layer matters because video is where most learners actually hear the language used naturally. Click any word inside a caption and the video pauses, the popover opens on Look up, and the word is decoded — meaning, IPA, examples. Closing the popover resumes the video from the exact frame, unless you had paused it yourself. The small AI icon at the top-right of the caption translates or explains the whole line in one tap. Saved captions link back to the timestamp, so the SRS card can replay the moment you learned the word — because hearing the word in its original context is the fastest way to recover it.
The optional practice loop closes the gap between reading and speaking. When you save a word, FluentWith adds it to your spaced-repetition queue (so it comes back at the moment you're about to forget it) and also makes it eligible to surface in AI speaking drills (so the next time you have a casual or interview conversation with the FluentWith AI, the word naturally comes up). For IELTS and TOEFL candidates, this is how academic vocabulary moves from “I recognise it” to “I just used it”. Read The Economist, The Guardian, Aeon, Wikipedia, or any technical blog; save the words you find; by exam day they're things you've already said out loud in twenty different contexts.
Privacy was a hard constraint from day one. The extension only does anything when you actively select text or click a caption word. Translation requests go straight from your browser to MyMemory; we never see them. Look-ups go straight to the Free Dictionary API; we never see those either. Explain runs on-device when your browser supports it; when it doesn't and you're signed in, the selected text is sent to our server-side model — that's the only path where Explain text leaves your device, and it requires you to be signed in. The optional Save action sends only what you'd expect: the word, the surrounding sentence, the page URL, the page title, and (on YouTube) the timestamped video URL. No background reading. No analytics. No tracking. No remote code. The bundle on the Chrome Web Store is built reproducibly from our publicly readable source repository on GitHub under an MIT licence.
Free. The extension is free, FluentWith is free to sign up, and the speaking practice and SRS reviews are free to use. Connect the extension to your account using a personal access token (revocable any time) so the extension never sees your login.
It helps you understand any English text you meet on the web. Highlight a word or sentence on any page (or click a word inside a YouTube caption) and the chip shows: a translation into your native language, a dictionary definition with IPA pronunciation, and a plain-language explanation generated on-device by Chrome's built-in AI. Saving is optional — when you do save, the word feeds straight into spaced-repetition flashcards and AI speaking drills on FluentWith.
No. Translate, Look up, and Explain all work without a FluentWith account. Only the optional Save action — sending the word to your vocabulary library — requires you to be signed in.
The Options page exposes nine native languages: Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Translation runs through MyMemory, which supports many more language pairs in the back end — we ship the dropdown with the most-requested ones for English learners and add to the list as users ask.
Yes — fully. Click any word in a YouTube caption to look it up (the video pauses; closing the popover resumes from the same frame). A small AI icon at the top-right of the caption box translates or explains the whole line in one click. When you save a caption, the link includes the timestamp so you can replay the exact moment.
Yes. The extension is free, and FluentWith itself is free to sign up and use. No credit card. Translate, Look up, and Explain work without an account; only Save needs you to be signed in to FluentWith.
Chrome 120+ and Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc). Explain prefers Chrome's on-device AI (Chrome 138+ with the built-in Prompt API enabled). If your browser doesn't support on-device AI and you're signed into FluentWith, Explain falls back to a server-side model. If neither is available, the Explain tab is hidden silently — Translate, Look up, and Save still work normally.
Three things. First, sentence-level translation — most dictionary extensions only handle single words; we translate full sentences in the same chip. Second, Explain prefers Chrome's on-device Prompt API, so when your browser supports it the paraphrase is generated entirely on your computer with no network roundtrip; if your browser doesn't support on-device AI we fall back to a server-side model (only when you're signed in). Third, the optional practice loop — when you do save, the word automatically becomes a spaced-repetition flashcard and surfaces in AI speaking drills, so vocabulary actually ends up in your speech rather than in a forgotten list.
Translation requests carry only the selected text plus a target-language code; they go directly from your browser to MyMemory. Look-ups go directly to the Free Dictionary API. Explain runs on-device when your browser supports it (Chrome 138+); when it doesn't and you're signed into FluentWith, the selected text is sent to our server-side model — that's the only path where Explain text leaves your device, and it requires you to be signed in. Save sends the selection, the surrounding sentence, the page URL, and the page title (plus the timestamped video URL when saved from a YouTube caption). No analytics, no tracking, no remote code. The source is publicly readable on GitHub at github.com/Saurava69/FluentWithExtension.
Google Docs renders text inside a <canvas>, so the browser's selection API can't read it — the chip won't appear there. Embedded iframes (Gmail compose, some readers) aren't covered in v1. Streaming services that render captions inside a <video> shadow root (Disney+ Hotstar, Coursera, Udemy, and similar) are also silent for now. Regular webpages — articles, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, news, blogs — and YouTube watch pages all work.
Yes. Reading English news, opinion pieces, and academic articles is one of the highest-leverage habits for the IELTS / TOEFL reading and writing sections. Translate gets you past confusing sentences without breaking flow; Look up and Explain ground new vocabulary; saving puts the words into spaced-repetition review and AI speaking drills, which is exactly what the speaking sections test.
Pair the extension with focused speaking practice: Casual · Interview · Business · Pronunciation · Video · all modes
Install the extension. Translate what you don't know. Save what's worth practicing.
Add to Chrome — free