Playto Lite: Game Screen Translator · published · build 25222534
This is the first of the UI updates we announced: fewer things on screen, one way to start, and a bar that lives on the game instead of a window you have to Alt-Tab into.
Turn resident mode on from Home and leave Playto open. When a game comes to the front, a small bar appears at its top right.
F4 reads the screen once — the line you are looking at is translated over the game. Flip the auto-translate switch on the bar and it keeps translating as you play; a stop button appears while a session runs. The bar's first line shows the keys that work right now — F4 to read, F3 to pause, F5 to hide or show the overlay.
It follows the game you switch to — reading once or translating automatically, Alt-Tab to another game you have played and the bar and the session move there a few seconds later, keeping the way it was reading. Games you told it "not now" or excluded are left alone.
Any window, not only detected games — it also offers to read browsers, the Steam client and other apps once they are in front. Exclude the ones you never want from the bar; the list is in Settings.
Compact until you need it — the bar is one row of icons. Hover to expand: how to read (cursor, fixed frame, window), the frame, text size and background sliders, then where the translation sits including a custom spot, game audio on or off, and the language pair and engine in use — icons only, the same ones Settings uses. It collapses when the pointer leaves.
Drag it where you want — the position is remembered per game and kept inside the game window.
Resident mode replaces the Quick Start buttons. The full learning session — Start on Home, review, session summary — is unchanged.
Resident mode is part of the Standard edition. In Lite the Home card is shown locked, and its guide still opens so you can see what the bar does.
Start a session from Home and the same bar appears on the game. Its first line says whether it is translating automatically or waiting for F4, and the switch on it turns automatic reading on or off — the same setting as Auto capture in Settings. The reading method, frame, text size, background and overlay position are all on the bar too, so you no longer have to guess why nothing is happening after Start.
Home is a single column: the resident mode card and Start. The two Quick Start buttons are gone. The resident mode card has a help button with a short guide and screenshots.
The start screen asks three things: which game, how to read it, where to read. Everything else sits under Details with its defaults.
Progress and review cards stay hidden until your first translation on a real game has worked.
The tutorial's "try it on your game" now starts resident mode.
Hide translation in the Log header shows the original only; open a line when you want the translation. Difficulty labels (CEFR, JLPT) have their own switch next to it.
Lines read while the overlay was hidden — another window in front, a pause — still land in the Log and the album.
Review cards for the game you are about to play open in a dialog over the start screen instead of stretching it.
The GPU memory warning now compares free memory with what the model needs plus a margin, instead of a share of the total.
When the app would swap to a larger model to fill in word definitions and the GPU is short, it asks first instead of hanging.
The language pair follows your UI language on first launch, and a toast says so when switching packs changes the pair.
Translations that came back in a third script are dropped instead of shown.
The overlay hides when the game is not in front and stays hidden if you hid it.
CPU Safe mode starts without the GPU backend and falls back to Auto after repeated failures.
When the bigger model for word definitions failed to load, Playto could switch itself to Cloud and stay there. It now brings your local model back instead — the same for "Generate now" in the session review.
When nothing could be translated, the overlay now says why for a few seconds — no text found, translation ran out of time on a busy screen, or the engine did not respond — instead of staying blank.
Turning automatic reading on from the bar now works even when Auto capture is off in Settings.
The in-app Guide was rewritten around the bar: the Quick Translate article is gone, and there are new articles for resident mode and for reading the Log with translations hidden.
Game audio in loud scenes: short lines with pauses can be cut or misheard. We are looking at the segmentation next.
If the same game has several windows open, Playto may read the largest one rather than the one in front. Keep one window open for now; we are changing it to prefer the window in front.
Work on game audio recognition, and showing what did get translated when a busy screen runs out of time. Tell us what you think below. If something still feels off, tell us through Contact us in the app, Discord, or this Steam thread.
If Playto is part of your gaming, a short review helps other language learners find it — and we read every one.