bob

Bob is a translation and OCR application for macOS, offered as a menu bar resident app for global shortcut operations. Note that Bob is not open-source; this repository was previously used to collect user feedback, and the official recommendation now is to submit issues through the contact page on its official website. For translation, Bob provides selection translation, screenshot translation, input translation, multi-window translation, custom plugins, automatic language detection, camel case splitting, and snake case splitting, and can be invoked via AppleScript and PopClip. Users can select text on screen and press a shortcut to view the translation, capture a screen area for translation, or directly input text in a dialog box. For OCR, Bob supports screenshot OCR, silent screenshot OCR, Finder image selection OCR, offline recognition, continuous recognition, QR code recognition, auto-copy, and intelligent segmentation. Silent screenshot OCR does not show a recognition window, directly writing recognized text to the clipboard, making it suitable for batch processing; Finder image selection OCR allows selecting multiple images at once for recognition. For service integration, Bob aggregates text translation services including System Translation, Volcano Translation, Tencent TranSmart, Alibaba Translation, Baidu Translation, Youdao Translation, Color Cloud XiaoYi, Niu Translation, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate, DeepL, and OpenAI. Text recognition supports offline recognition, Volcano OCR, Tencent OCR, Tencent image translation, Baidu OCR, Youdao OCR, and Google OCR. Speech synthesis supports offline synthesis and services from Volcano, Tencent, Google, and Microsoft. For installation, Bob is distributed via the Mac App Store. After launch, an icon appears in the menu bar, and clicking the menu triggers the relevant functions; shortcuts can be customized in the preferences. The official documentation site provides more detailed usage instructions. The project acknowledgments mention SiliconFlow and Zhipu AI providing free large model inference services for Bob users, as well as several community contributors and media articles. Overall, Bob targets users who frequently require text translation and image text recognition on macOS, emphasizing a shortcut-driven global invocation experience and flexible switching between multiple services.