Five file chores, one Shift key

Look at what people pay for to deal with files. A reader to listen to a PDF: Speechify Premium is $139 a year (our Speechify alternatives). A translator for a letter: DeepL's free account does one file a month (DeepL alternatives). An expense app to turn a receipt into a row (Expensify alternatives). Something to explain a bill you don't understand, and something to get a booking's dates into your calendar.

Each one means another app, another upload, another login. So we put all five on one gesture.

1. Start dragging any file on your Mac: a PDF, a Word file, slides, a photo of a page.
2. Hold Shift. A wheel opens round your pointer, with five wedges.
3. Drop the file on one: Explain, Translate, Read aloud, Add expense or Add to calendar.

Pictures and scanned pages are read on your Mac first, with Apple's text recognition. Then only the words go to Koi's AI, never the file. Read aloud sends nothing at all: your Mac's own voices read it.

We tested each wedge on real-looking files before writing this.

Explain is the one we like most. A letter from a tax office is the kind of paper people put off for days. Drop it, and Koi talks: “This is a property tax notice from Lisbon. You need to pay four hundred and twelve euros and sixty cents by November thirtieth. Would you like me to explain anything about it?” Then you just ask. It answers from the letter's own words, which it keeps on a page with what to do and what to watch out for.

• Translate keeps paragraphs, lists and headings, not the file's exact layout. A form with boxes comes back as plain text.
• Read aloud uses the voices your Mac has. No speed control and no library yet.
• The expense tracker is personal: one currency, no expense reports, no approvals.
• It's Mac only.

The Shift wheel is part of Koi. Pro is $20 a month, or $192 a year, after a 3-day free trial that needs a card. Lifetime is paid once, from $59. More on the Shift wheel, or how to use it step by step.