Guide

Private, offline language learning from your own files

Most language apps want the opposite of privacy. You make an account. Your progress lives on their servers. Your study material is whatever they licensed, streamed from their cloud, wrapped in a subscription you never stop paying. If you'd rather learn from your own files, on your own machine, this is for you.

What "local-first" actually means here

Langcap is built so that nothing has to leave your computer:

• Your files stay in your folders. You drop in a video, audio file, ebook, PDF, or web page, and it's read in place — not uploaded anywhere.
• The work happens on your machine. Speech and language models download once, then run locally on your GPU — transcription, mining the questions, deciding what to ask next, all on-device.
• No account, no upload, offline after setup. There's nothing to sign up for, and once the one-time model download is done, it works with the network off.
• The one exception is opt-in and off by default. If you want a translation beneath the transcript, you add your own Google or Anthropic API key and that sentence alone is sent. Leave it off — which is how it ships — and nothing goes anywhere.

And you own it

Because it isn't a cloud service, it isn't a subscription. Langcap is a one-time purchase — you own that version for good, and it keeps working whether or not you ever pay again. The first year of updates is included; after that, keeping up with new features is optional. Nothing you study is held hostage on someone's server.

The honest edges

It's a young Windows app (macOS later) and needs a Vulkan-capable GPU. Seven languages have the full text-or-audio on-ramp — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese — and Japanese and Korean study from audio today, with their text voice coming.