ELA-English Learner Assistant

Reading a foreign-language article often means juggling tabs: one for the text, one for a dictionary, another for a translator, and one more to hear the pronunciation. ELA (Everyday Language Assistant) collapses that into a single Chrome side panel. It is a reading companion that uses GPT models to translate, look up words and read text aloud, keeping you inside your reading flow rather than bouncing between apps.

The workflow is text-selection based. Turn on the capture toggle, select any passage on a page, and it appears instantly in the side panel. From there you can press Play to hear it read aloud in natural-sounding voices powered by OpenAI TTS (and download the audio as MP3), use the pre-configured Translate and Word Lookup buttons, or trigger buttons you have built yourself. The customisable buttons are the differentiating piece: because each button is simply a saved AI prompt, you can tailor ELA to a particular language, subject or study technique, from vocabulary drills to grammar explanations.

ELA is deliberately privacy-conscious and lightweight. It uses your own OpenAI API key, which is stored locally in Chrome storage along with your prompts and voice preferences; the extension states that nothing is sent to any server it operates, that it does not run in the background, and that it collects no data. It is also fully open source, with the code available on GitHub, and requires no account. Supporting languages include English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish, and it is actively updated.