Disclaimer: I received a free license key to test this app and post a review. The review content is entirely my own, with no conditions placed on its content or sentiment.
Popclip is the usual app that people use for interactions with content on MacOS. Xylect takes it one step further, it aims to function like Google’s smart lens AI feature, it tries to predict what someone might want to do with selected text, rather than giving you a list of all possible options.
So, let’s go through all the five (six?) claimed abilities at the moment.
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The summarization feature works fine, but with the new writing tools in the latest version of Apple Mac OS, you probably won't need it. You can simply right-click on non-native apps or click the magic button on native apps to summarize content, and it will show up in a pop-up. I know it's an intentional step rather than an automatic pop-up, but I don't think it's worth getting the app just for this feature. Xylect is faster than Apple’s summarization, and that time savings adds up when you use the tool multiple times a day.
I checked out the translation feature, and it seems to send the text to a backend model for translation, which is fine as it includes contextual information. However, it responds with a lot of text, even when I'm trying to translate just a single word. I wish this was more thoughtfully designed.
The "Add to Calendar" feature works, but it requires a very specific date and time format. It doesn't fit in the title itself; it just creates a Google Calendar or Apple Calendar link based on the time. I'm not a big fan of that. Instead, I use Hey Dola for these purposes. It's free right now, though it might not stay that way. I'll link it here if you want calendaring with text or images, which makes it much easier.
The spell check feature in Xylect works per word and doesn't understand context. So, while it can correctly spell "enable," it corrects "flght" to "fight" instead of "flight" because it's choosing the nearest correct word rather than the one that fits the context, even though you have the word "tracking" nearby.
The calculation option for the selected math text didn't work for me at all. It seems like it's sending the text as a prompt to a machine learning model and returning the answer, rather than performing the calculation on the backend, so I wouldn't rely on this feature.
The flight feature is nice, but I often end up using Raycast for flight tracking anyway. Some flights work, some don't. It's integrated with FlightAware, so I'm not sure how much of it is a Xylect’s issue versus a FlightAware issue. It seems to work for US flights but not for Indian flights, whereas I can use Raycast for both types of flights.
