Hi everyone! I'm an indie developer from Vietnam, and I made a comic translation app called EasyComix.
One of the reasons I built it is that I want to support original creators. I don't want their work to be used to train AI or shared on piracy sites.
The way EasyComix works is basically like reading the text in the speech bubbles yourself, then pasting that text into a translator. It does NOT send the whole comic page to GPT, Gemini, or other free AI models.
First, a little background: these days, when people hear "AI," they usually think of ChatGPT or Gemini, which are large language models that keep learning and run in huge data centers.
But long before those, there was another kind of AI: models that do just one job. Things like "find where the text is in this image," "look at handwriting and figure out the letters," or more generally, recognizing objects.
You use these every day. Face ID recognizes your face, cameras read license plates, and so on. These models are fully trained ahead of time and then run right on your device. They don't need to connect to the cloud to learn more every time you use them.
EasyComix uses this kind of model for image processing. Finding and reading the text all happens right on your phone. So the comic images themselves never need to be uploaded to an AI service.
You can check this yourself: turn off your internet and try EasyComix's free features. Text detection still works just fine.
The part that actually needs internet is the advanced translation step. To translate novels and comics naturally, while keeping the tone and context, EasyComix uses a large language model (LLM) for this step.
EasyComix uses a self-hosted LLM. Simply put, the model was already fully trained, and we run it on our own servers. That doesn't mean the content you send gets automatically used to retrain the model.
Even at this step, the original comic images stay on your phone. Your phone has already turned the images into text. All that gets sent to our server is a few lines of recognized text, not the full page.
Novels work the same way.
There's also a disclaimer in the EasyComix app that explains all of this, so feel free to check it out in the app.
Thanks so much for your interest and for reading all the way to the end ❤️