changelog
What changed.
Version by version. The most recent at the top.
yunit is in beta, and every version below 1.0 is a beta version. Things move faster here than they will later, and a release may change something you had grown used to. When that happens, it is written down on this page.
version 0.4.1
Japanese and Chinese, properly.
July 26, 2026.
Both languages have been in the menu since the start, and neither truly worked: text written without spaces defeated the way yunit finds words, so pages produced almost nothing. This release gives the picker a real sense of where words begin and end, and brings Swedish along as a new language.
New
- ·Japanese and Chinese work. yunit now finds real word boundaries in scripts written without spaces, so reading in Japanese or Chinese annotates actual words, skips the grammatical particles, and keeps a sensible sentence with each saved word. Both languages come with frequency data, so the reading frontier can form there too.
- ·Swedish. A new language, and a fully equipped one from day one: lemmas, frequency ranks, and dictionary definitions with pronunciation.
- ·Listings in your language. The store pages can now be read in several of the languages yunit teaches; translations arrive store by store, beginning with Spanish, Romanian, and Russian.
Fixed
- ·The last minutes of live captions. With a few minutes left of a monthly captions allowance, starting a session used to be refused as if nothing remained. The final stretch is now sized to what is actually left, down to the last minute.
- ·Mixed-language pages route better. A mostly-Japanese page with a few English words in it no longer confuses the language detection.
version 0.4.0
Words that know when to come back.
July 24, 2026.
Until now, a word that fell due waited on the page as a question mark until you answered it. Read for a week without answering and your pages filled with questions. This release rebuilds the way kept words return, so that reading stays reading.
New
- ·yunit, in the player. A ✱ button now sits in the YouTube player’s own controls, just left of the caption button. It opens a short menu for live captions, lyrics, dual-language reading, and annotation density, each with its keyboard shortcut printed beside it. It follows the video into theater and fullscreen, where until now there were no controls at all.
- ·A gentler return. Most due words now simply appear again in your reading with the translation showing, a quiet second meeting. Only a few arrive as a question mark, a couple per page at most and a set number per day, which you tune with the same density dial as everything else.
- ·Words that take a hint. Scroll past a question mark without answering and yunit waits longer before asking again. Do it a few times and it stops asking altogether, going back to simply showing you the translation until you engage again.
- ·Nothing ambushes you. A word you have not met in weeks comes back translated, as re-reading rather than as a test.
- ·A review session, when you want one. Words that never happen to appear in your browsing had no way home. Your lexicon page now offers a short session, one card at a time, built from the very sentences you met each word in. Space reveals, k and f answer, escape leaves.
- ·Your reading frontier. Once you have kept enough words, the lexicon page says roughly where your reading stands, worked out from how common the words you keep are. Four broad bands, and it stays quiet until it has enough to say.
Changed
- ·Live captions hold still. Captions used to be rebuilt around whichever sentence was being spoken, so a finished line jumped upward, lost its opening words to make room, and could still be rewritten by a translation that arrived late. Each stream is now a roll of finished lines: a line is laid out once and never changes again, the line being spoken stays in the same place, and completed lines move up by exactly one row. A translation that lands after its sentence ended finishes where it started instead of cutting what you were reading.
- ·The first time you remember a word, it now waits three days before returning instead of one. The day you saved it already counted as the first meeting.
- ·Review dates carry a small spread, so a batch of words saved in one sitting stops coming due all on the same day forever.
- ·New words are picked with an eye to how common they are in the language you are learning, rather than by how long they are. Words far below your level, and far above it, come up less often.
version 0.3.2
Sync that keeps its word.
July 21, 2026.
No headline feature this time. This release is the plumbing under the promise. What you save stays saved, what you delete stays deleted, and live captions mind their manners.
Changed
- ·Premium live captions are 15 hours a month. Enough for a film or a lecture every other day, and the meter on your account page reads the same number.
- ·Twelve more languages recognize their word forms. Ukrainian, Czech, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, Estonian, Irish, and Persian now have proper form-to-dictionary-word data, so inflected words collapse into one vocabulary entry the way the first eight languages always did.
Fixed
- ·Deleting a word now deletes it everywhere. Another signed-in device could quietly bring a deleted word back on its next sync; deletions now travel across devices like saves do.
- ·Large vocabularies restore completely when you sign in on a new device. Previously only the most recent thousand or so entries made the trip.
- ·Words saved while several tabs were open could miss the daily backup. The backup queue is now shared properly between tabs.
- ·One page with an unusually long address or title could silently stall backups for good. Sync now sets the odd one aside and keeps going.
- ·Live captions stop when their tab leaves YouTube, including right after the browser restarts. They could keep listening with nothing on screen.
- ·Starting live captions on a second tab now works on the first press.
- ·Upgrading to Premium takes effect in open tabs without waiting for a reload.
version 0.3.1
Live captions, translated as they happen.
July 16, 2026.
Play a YouTube video in your target language and read it in real time. The biggest feature yunit has shipped, alongside a more careful first sign-in.
New
- ·Live captions (Premium). yunit listens to the tab’s audio and writes translated captions on the video as people speak, with original and translation side by side in a transcript panel next to the player. Alt+Shift+C starts and stops them, fullscreen included. Chrome and Edge on a computer.
- ·Thirty minutes on the house. Signed-in accounts get a monthly taste of live captions before deciding on Premium.
- ·One wardrobe for text on video. Captions wear the same appearance settings as lyrics: contrast style, color, and size, tuned once in the Aa menu.
- ·Instant or settled. Choose whether translations stream in as they are produced or arrive as finished sentences.
- ·A more careful first sign-in. Words saved before you signed in are offered for import, never uploaded silently. Signing out removes the account’s synced words from the machine you leave behind.
version 0.2.2
Lyrics, legible on any video.
June 9, 2026.
The on-video lyrics overlay learns to dress for the footage it sits on, and a round of fixes lands alongside.
New
- ·Overlay appearance. White text on a bright video was sometimes unreadable. The lyrics panel now has an Aa menu with three contrast styles (a soft shadow, a hard outline, or a caption-style plate that reads on anything), a small palette of text colors, and three sizes. Your choices follow you to every tab and every device.
- ·Lyrics sized to the player. The overlay text now scales with the video itself, so fullscreen on a large display reads like a proper karaoke screen instead of a footnote.
- ·Upcoming line. Optional: show the next lyric dimmed beneath the current one, so your eyes can parse ahead of the singer.
- ·Songs remember. Re-opening lyrics on a video you have watched before is now instant, and a sync adjustment you dialed in for a live recording is still there when you come back to it.
- ·Click a line to replay it. In the panel, any line of a synced song is a jump point. Tap the line you are trying to parse and the song goes there.
- ·Smarter song detection. Official uploads often title the video with just the song name and keep the artist in the channel. yunit now reads both, so fewer songs land in manual search.
- ·Annotations, fully off. Click the active density dot to turn automatic annotations off entirely while keeping selection, hover, lyrics, and dual-language reading alive. Click any dot to bring them back.
Fixed
- ·The overlay steps out of the way of YouTube’s own captions when both are on, instead of stacking text on text.
- ·Closing and reopening the lyrics panel no longer freezes the karaoke highlight, and the on-video overlay keeps singing while the panel is closed.
- ·The Lyrics card keeps its place at the top of the sidebar instead of landing above or below the playlist depending on load timing, and every panel control now dresses properly for YouTube’s dark theme.
- ·Settings changes now apply immediately to every open tab, on every site, and across signed-in devices. No reload required.
- ·Annotations stay readable on pages with transparent or unusual backgrounds, and the per-word panel keeps itself fully on screen.
- ·Saved phrases can be deleted like any word, the lyrics toggle takes effect mid-session, and vocabulary edits made on the vocabulary page sync to your account like everything else.
version 0.2.0
A few small adjustments.
May 16, 2026.
Three new ways to tune yunit to your preference, and one missing close button restored.
New
- ·Annotation size. The small translation floating above each marked word now has three sizes: small, medium, and large. Choose the one that reads most comfortably without redrawing your attention.
- ·Annotations stay out of copies. When you select a passage that contains marked words, the copied text contains the source language only, not the floating translations stacked above each word. The originals paste cleanly.
- ·Lyrics that open themselves. Optional: enable it once and the lyrics panel comes up on every YouTube watch page you visit, so it becomes the default surface rather than an Alt+Shift+L away.
Fixed
- ·Small refinement to the per-word panel’s close button: the × in the corner dismisses the panel cleanly, no re-opens.
version 0.1.0
First release.
May 2026.
yunit picks foreign-language words from any page you read and quietly translates a few of them, so vocabulary travels with you across the web. Saved words go into a vocabulary panel with spaced-repetition review timing, dictionary entries, and a confidence score that reflects how comfortably you recognise each one as you keep encountering it. Everything works without an account; signing in adds backup and, on Premium, live sync across devices.
What shipped
- ·Inline annotations. A handful of words on each page receive a small translation placed just above them, not so many that the page feels scribbled-on; enough that you encounter a few unfamiliar ones per scroll. Density is adjustable.
- ·Per-word panel. Click any annotated word for the translation, the surrounding sentence as context, a Wiktionary definition, and a pronunciation icon. Save it with one click; it moves to your vocabulary and begins its review schedule.
- ·Selection translation. Drag-select any sentence or phrase and a floating panel offers a full-phrase translation, with the unknown words inside ready to be picked out and saved one by one.
- ·Dual-language reading mode. Press Alt+Shift+D to switch any page into a side-by-side or inline-glossed form: two columns of comprehension instead of one, for long-form articles where the inline annotations aren’t enough.
- ·Lyrics on YouTube. Open the lyrics panel on any music video and the lyrics scroll with the song, each line glossed inline. Press Alt+Shift+L to toggle, or find it in the toolbar menu.
- ·Vocabulary panel. Your saved words in a commonplace-book layout: large serif word, italic translation, sentence-form metadata, indented quotation. Filter by due, mastered, or all; deep-link to a single word from anywhere.
- ·Confidence score. A small signal next to each word. It weighs the review cards you’ve got right together with how often you keep needing the translation in passing. A score of 3 of 5 reads differently from a score of 3 of 5 and falling.
- ·Site rules. Run yunit everywhere except a handful of sites, or only on a chosen handful and quiet everywhere else. Both modes available from the popup; the lists are kept side by side, so flipping between them preserves the rules you set.
- ·Optional account. Sign up with email at yunit.app; the extension picks up the session through a shared cookie. Free gets a daily vocabulary backup and settings sync; Premium gets live multi-device sync and access to the sharper LLM-backed translations.
- ·Local-first by default. Anonymous users never touch our servers. Picker, vocabulary, review schedule, and settings all live on your device until you choose otherwise.
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