Every letter,
kept forever.
Combray photographs your handwritten letters, transcribes the handwriting with Claude, and keeps them in a searchable archive — the original beside a faithful reading, for good.
One bite of the madeleine brings it all back.
Currently requires a Claude subscription — sign up here ↗
Start reading tonight.
Combray is a Mac app. Download the installer, or use Homebrew if you'd rather.
brew tap Labern/combray && brew install --cask combray
macOS 13 or later · Apple Silicon.
Transcription runs on Claude, so you sign in with a paid Claude plan — for now; wider access is coming.
First launch: right-click Combray in Applications → Open (it isn't notarized yet).
Lifetime license — coming soon.
A home for handwriting.
Boxes of letters, near-illegible cursive, dates you can't quite read. Combray takes a photo of each page, has Claude read the hand and pull out who wrote it, to whom, when, and what it says — then keeps it all in plain folders on your Mac that you own outright. One flow, four moments: capture → transcribe → read → keep.
Photograph a letter. Claude reads it.
Scan the on-screen QR code with your iPhone and photograph each page — they fly to your Mac and open as a new letter. Or drag photos in, or choose them from the Mac. Then Claude transcribes the handwriting faithfully and fills in the details.
- Faithful transcription of even near-illegible cursive
- Auto-extracts the title, sender, recipients, date & a summary
- Original photo on the left, editable reading on the right
- Sign in with your Claude plan — no API key
Set like a real letter — and read to you.
Paragraphs are reflowed and justified in a warm serif, never jagged. Press play to hear the letter, with the word being spoken highlighted, a running timer, and 15-second skips.
- Justified, paragraph-perfect reading view
- Read-aloud with live word highlighting & ±15s skip
- Position / total timer as it plays
- A natural British voice, built in — male or female to match the writer
Or open it big and centred.
When you just want to read, “View full size” lifts the transcription into a calm, centred column — the date in UK style, the title in display serif, nothing else in the way.
- Distraction-free, book-like reading
- UK dates (DD/MM/YYYY) throughout
- Light & Dark mode, switchable from the toolbar
Browse by people, by years — or just search.
Your archive organises itself. See everyone someone corresponded with, read a decade as a timeline, or find any letter by theme, period, writer, or a pair of people.
- Browse by People and by Years
- Full-text search with ranked, highlighted results
- Pin up to three important letters to the top
Every mode, one archive.
iPhone capture
A QR code links your phone; photograph pages and watch them upload — Sent → Transcribing → Done. No app to install.
Read a correspondence as a chat beta
The back-and-forth between two people, laid out like a modern messaging thread.
Export to Word
Save any letter as a .docx in the same beautiful font you read on screen.
Share to Gmail
Open a Gmail draft with the letter already in it — one click.
Meta insights
What the letter quietly reveals — likely location, relationship and its state, the writer's goals, their likely age and sex.
Endearment → real name
If your mother signs every letter “sweetness,” Combray works out who that is and records the real name.
Automatic updates
Combray checks for new versions and updates itself quietly — your letters are never touched.
iCloud backup
Copy every letter folder to iCloud Drive from the bottom-left, whenever you like.
Light & Dark
A warm, literary look built on design tokens — re-themed in one place, day or night.
Your letters are yours.
Every letter is written to a plain, Finder-browsable folder on your Mac — the original page images, the transcription as text, and the details as JSON. Combray rebuilds itself from those files, so your archive outlives any version of the app. Nothing is locked in a database; nothing is held to ransom.
letter_7_page_1.jpg — the original page (open it in Preview)
letter.json — sender, date, summary, transcription
transcription.txt — the plain-text reading