Polili — Pronunciation Everywhere

About

Watch Chinese video and understand every word — without pausing to copy characters into a translator.

Polili reads the Chinese subtitles directly off the screen with on-screen OCR and floats tone-marked pinyin above every character, live, while the video plays. Click any character to hear it spoken. Hover to see its meaning from a 100,000-entry offline dictionary.

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WHERE IT WORKS
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Polili reads the subtitle pixels on screen instead of a hidden caption track, so it works even when subtitles are burned into the picture or there is no separate caption track at all. That covers most Chinese video on free sites like YouTube and Bilibili, as well as local video files you open in Chrome.

It cannot read DRM-protected streaming services, which encrypt the video so the browser only ever receives a black frame — no extension can read those. We mention this up front so there are no surprises.

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WHY POLILI IS DIFFERENT
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Most subtitle tools read the streaming site's subtitle DATA track. That means they can't help when subtitles are burned into the picture, or when there's no subtitle track at all — which is most YouTube, Bilibili, and regional drama content.

Polili reads the PIXELS, not the data. So it works exactly where the others can't.

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WHAT YOU GET (free)
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• Live pinyin overlay on video subtitles (PaddleOCR — runs on your machine)
• Pinyin on every Chinese character on any web page
• Hover any word for its meaning (full CC-CEDICT dictionary, bundled offline)
• Click any character to hear it pronounced (zh-CN)
• Snip tool — draw a box around any text to get pinyin + definitions
• Sentence translation + auto-built transcript with pinyin
• Library — every movie you watch is saved by name with its full transcript. Add notes per line and per movie, then review later with a hidden-answer recall mode (characters stay, pinyin + meaning hide until you tap). Export any transcript to share or use in Anki.
• Interface in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese

Everything runs locally in your browser. No account. No sign-up. No images or audio sent to any server. Free, with no usage limits.

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HOW TO START (10 seconds)
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1. Open a Chinese video on YouTube, Bilibili, or Viki and press play.
2. Click the Polili icon, drag the strip over the subtitle line, tap Start.
3. Pinyin appears above every character — live. (Polili remembers your strip position for next time, per site.)

For best accuracy, set the video to 720p or higher — bigger characters = better OCR.

Built for Chinese now. Korean, Arabic, Thai, and Vietnamese are on the way.
Questions or a site that doesn't work? Email [email protected] — we reply.