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Cove Photo

Cove Photo

Point your camera at anything — plants, labels, homework, signs. Get answers and follow-ups, all on your phone.

View release status See how it works

Features

  • One-tap visual answer

    Snap a photo of a plant, a foreign label, a math problem, or anything you can't quite name. Cove answers in your language, on your device.

  • Keep asking follow-ups

    Cove keeps the photo in context across a chat. Ask 'is this safe for my dog?' or 'what's the gluten content?' without retaking the picture.

  • Searchable local history

    Every photo and answer lives in a history you can scroll, search, and pin. Stored only on your phone, never on a server.

  • Stays on your phone

    Photos are processed on-device. Cove does not upload them, does not OCR them in the cloud, and does not collect telemetry on what you photographed.

How people use it

  1. Identifying a plant in the garden

    Snap the leaf. Cove names the species, summarizes care needs, and answers your follow-up — 'is this toxic to cats?' — without sending the picture anywhere.

  2. Decoding a foreign nutrition label

    Photograph the back of a Japanese snack pack at 2am in a Tokyo combini. Cove reads the ingredient list, flags allergens, and translates the storage instructions — offline.

  3. Helping a kid with homework

    Point the camera at a tricky math problem. Cove walks through the steps and lets you ask 'why does that work?' without your kid's worksheet ending up on someone else's training data.

Comparison evidence and scope

Feature Cove Google Lens ChatGPT Vision
Works fully offline ✓ – –
Photos never uploaded ✓ – –
Multi-turn follow-up about the photo ✓ ~ ✓
Searchable local history ✓ ~ ~
One-time purchase ✓ ✓ –

Who is this for

  • Curious explorers — gardens, museums, farmers' markets, foreign convenience stores.
  • Parents helping with homework who don't want every worksheet to feed someone's training data.
  • Privacy-minded users who would rather not have every photo OCR'd by a cloud account.

When not to reach for it

  • Live AR overlay during a video stream — Cove is single-shot, not real-time AR.
  • Industrial defect inspection or fine-grained medical imaging — those need specialized vision systems.

Frequently asked questions

How does a phone do image analysis offline?

Cove ships a Gemma 4 multimodal model that runs on your phone's NPU. The first launch downloads the model once; after that every photo, every follow-up, every answer is computed locally — no upload, no API key, no cloud.

How is this different from Google Lens?

Google Lens uploads each photo to Google's servers and ties results to your Google account. Cove processes the photo on your phone and never associates the result with any identity. The trade-off is range — Lens has more obscure objects in its index; Cove gets the common 90% with no upload.

How accurate compared to ChatGPT Vision?

On everyday objects, plants, common labels, and printed text Cove is close. For obscure or fine-grained recognition (rare bird subspecies, niche industrial parts) a larger cloud model still wins. We list this honestly so you can pick the right tool.

Where is my photo history stored?

On your phone, in app-private storage. Uninstalling Cove deletes everything. There is no Cove account, no cloud sync, and no way for us to retrieve a photo even if you asked us to.

Pricing

Prices will be announced with the public release.

No public prices or purchase terms have been confirmed. Follow release updates for verified details.

Get release updates

Stay in the loop on Cove.

Get release notes and indie-developer updates. No marketing emails, ever.

  • Release notes when new versions ship
  • A short monthly note from the indie developer
  • One-click unsubscribe from every email

We store only your email for release updates. One-click unsubscribe from every message.

Understand what you see — without the cloud.

One download. No account. Photos stay on your phone.

View release status Explore other Cove apps