วันนี้กินข้าวยัง
Thai is written with no spaces. Four words are in that line. Nothing in it tells you where any of them end.
วันนี้
wan-níi
today
กิน
gin
to eat
ข้าว
khâao
rice; a meal
ยัง
yang
yet
“Have you eaten today?”
Yaek pulls Thai apart so you can read what someone wrote to you.
Paste or photograph Thai. Every word is separated, sounded out with its tone, and glossed. No account, no connection — the dictionary is on your phone.
It goes both ways.
Read the Thai you were sent. Draft the Thai you want to send back.
คิดถึงนะ
khít-thǔeng ná
“missing you”
Paste it, share it from any app, or photograph it and frame the words. Yaek shows you what it read before it splits anything, and marks what it couldn't make out instead of guessing.
“have you eaten today?”
วันนี้กินข้าวยัง
wan-níi gin khâao yang
Type English, get Thai — separated and sounded out the same way, so you can check every word before you trust it. See what it gets wrong.
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network requests after setup
Not an offline mode you switch on. Yaek asks the network for exactly one thing, once: the translation model, downloaded when you say so and never again. After that the dictionary and the model sit on your device; put the phone in airplane mode and nothing about the app changes.
- no account, no sign-in
- nothing you paste leaves the phone
- no analytics, no crash telemetry
- works on a plane, in a basement, on a dead SIM
The tone is already in the spelling.
Most dictionaries store a pronunciation next to each word, so a word that isn't in the dictionary has no pronunciation at all. Thai doesn't need that. Which of the five tones a syllable takes is a rule, and the rule reads four things off the written form.
ข้าว
- the first consonant ข high class
- the vowel -า long
- it ends in ว, a sound you can hold live syllable
- the mark above it ◌้ mái thoo
Because the rule runs on letters rather than entries, a name, a slang coinage, or a word Yaek has never seen still comes back sounded out correctly. You may not learn what it means — but you can say it out loud, and often that is enough to be understood.
Three things Yaek gets wrong.
Both are known, neither is fixable by trying harder, and you should read them before you rely on it.
Sanskrit and Pali loanwords break the tone rules.
Thai borrowed a large formal vocabulary — religion, law, government, most abstract nouns — from Sanskrit and Pali, and those words kept spellings that predate the tone system. Silent letters, unwritten vowels, clusters that split into two syllables. The derivation runs on them anyway and can come back with the wrong tone or the wrong number of syllables.
Yaek doesn't hide this. Where a word is a known loan, the romanization is marked and the derived reading is shown as a guess rather than an answer. Dictionary entries override it; unknown loans are the case where Yaek is least trustworthy.
Machine-composed Thai has no manners.
Politeness in Thai is carried by small words the model drops: the sentence-final particles ครับ khráp and ค่ะ khâ, and the softening นะ ná. It also picks pronouns by coin toss, and Thai has many, each one a statement about who you are to the person reading.
The output is grammatical and blunt — fine for a menu, wrong for a message. Treat composition as a draft you read word by word before you send it. Yaek splits its own output for exactly that reason.
A photograph of a street is not a screenshot.
Reading text off an image is two problems, and Yaek is much better at one of them. Given a cropped screenshot of a message, 98.6% of the words come through and 87% of messages are perfect. Point the camera across a road instead — display lettering, an angle, distance, glare — and about one word in twelve is lost, and one in thirty is a word nobody wrote.
So Yaek asks you to frame the words rather than hunting for them, shows you the Thai it read before it splits anything, and marks what it couldn't make out instead of reading it aloud. A word that was never written is worse than a word that is missing: the missing one you go and ask about, the invented one you learn.
Get Yaek
Free. No account. The app is small; the language is not.
- Dictionary, inside the app — 98,831 entries
- 41 MB
- Translation model, fetched once on first launch
- 399 MB
- Every launch after that
- 0 bytes
The dictionary ships in the app, so reading, tone and word breakdown work before you download anything. The 399 MB is the translation model, and it is the only thing Yaek ever fetches — do it on wifi. You can delete it later and keep everything else.