SumizAI vs Arc: AI Screen Assistant

What Arc: AI Screen Assistant is

What Arc: AI Screen Assistant is

Arc: AI Screen Assistant is an Android app that lets you create instant, one-tap AI actions like "Fact Check," "Find Calories," or "Find Cheaper Alternatives" on ANY screen. Instead of copying text or taking a screenshot and switching to a separate AI app, a user triggers a ready-made action with a single tap right where they currently are — whether browsing social media, reading an article, or looking at an online store listing.

Coming from India, available in a freemium model exclusively for Android, the tool targets the massive market of Android smartphone users, where this kind of productivity tool tends to be especially well received given the huge variety of apps and content consumed daily on a phone screen.

The concept of one-tap actions working on any screen, rather than only inside one specific app, is a key differentiator for Arc compared to typical AI assistants confined to their own interface — a user doesn't need to copy text out of Instagram or a browser, but triggers a fact check or a price comparison directly on the screen in question.

A health-conscious person using Arc's "Find Calories" action every time they browse food photos on social media or restaurant websites gradually builds intuition about the calorie content of different dishes, but without saving specific, verified values, it's hard to recall that information for a similar meal weeks later.

SumizAI complements Arc exactly at that point: the results of checks run through Arc's one-tap actions — dish calorie counts, verified facts, cheaper alternatives found — can be saved as ai notes in a local Markdown file, building a personal database of verified information. Someone comparing product prices on every shopping trip ends up with ai notes holding a history of verified prices, useful for judging whether a given "deal" is actually a bargain.

These tools complement each other: Arc runs instant, one-tap checks directly on any phone screen, while SumizAI ensures the results of those checks survive as ai notes ready to recall for the next similar decision, long after a specific app or screenshot has been closed.

Over time, the more these notes an Arc user accumulates, the more valuable this personal database of verified information becomes — facts or prices checked once don't need re-checking, as long as they were solidly documented in these notes instead of remaining a fleeting result of a single screen tap.

Someone planning a home renovation, using Arc's "Find Cheaper Alternatives" action every time they browse furniture or building material listings across different online stores, ends up after a few weeks with dozens of individual checks scattered across the app's history. By moving the most important findings into one organized these notes devoted to the whole renovation project, they get a clear overview of every option considered along with prices, which makes the final purchasing decision much easier and avoids buying the same product twice simply because they forgot a cheaper alternative had already been found earlier.

That is our reading of the record. For AlternativeTo's own wording, see its page for Arc: AI Screen Assistant — the facts above were read on 2026-08-16.

Arc: AI Screen Assistant in depth

A sidebar that sits on top of whatever Android app you are in

Arc is an Android-only assistant built around one idea: you should not have to leave the screen you are looking at to ask a question about it. Instead of a chat app you switch to, Arc appears as a floating sidebar you pull out over any other application — a browser article, a PDF viewer, a messaging thread, a shopping listing — and it works with the content currently displayed. The developer is credited on AlternativeTo as mamata, based in India and publishing under appsrethink.com; the product page carries a 2026 copyright line. The project's original address was a GitHub Pages site at rethink-hub.github.io, which now redirects permanently to the dedicated domain, a small sign that it graduated from side project to something the author is maintaining.

AlternativeTo files the entry under Office & Productivity together with OS & Utilities, and labels it a proprietary freemium product. Its tags — AI assistant, accessibility, productivity tool, AI automation, workflow automation, AI summary app — capture the split personality reasonably well: part reading aid, part text rewriter, part shortcut engine.

Custom actions are the actual product

The headline capability is user-defined one-tap actions. You write a prompt once, save it to the sidebar, and from then on it runs against whatever is on screen with a single tap. The examples the developer gives are deliberately mundane and specific: fact-check this claim, estimate the calories in this meal, find alternatives to this product. That framing is the difference between Arc and a generic chatbot — the assumption is that most people re-ask the same handful of questions all day and would rather have buttons than retype prompts.

Around that sit several prepared functions. AI Summary condenses articles, long message threads and web pages. A text reader speaks any visible text aloud with automatic language detection and text-to-speech voices, which effectively turns any document or article into audio without exporting it anywhere. An AI writer handles rewriting, drafting replies, translating and tidying text inside whatever app you are typing in. A chat mode lets you keep asking follow-up questions about the same screen rather than getting a single canned answer. Save for Later captures text and images out of any app into the assistant's own store. There is also a community layer where actions written by other users can be shared and adopted, which matters for a tool whose value depends on how good your prompt library is — not everyone wants to write their own.

Privacy design: no watching in the background

Screen-reading assistants on Android normally raise an obvious objection, and Arc's marketing answers it head-on. The developer states there is no background monitoring and no screenshot taken without explicit permission — the assistant looks at the screen when you invoke it, not continuously. Custom actions and chat history are held locally on the device, and content is only processed for the AI request rather than being retained server-side, unless the user deliberately switches on Google Drive backup.

The most concrete safeguard is the sensitive app blocker: Arc disables itself automatically in roughly 400 applications identified as sensitive, the categories named being banking apps, cryptocurrency wallets and password managers. That is a behaviour worth understanding before you rely on it — it is a maintained blocklist, not a semantic judgement about what is on screen, so an unusual finance app may not be covered while a perfectly harmless one may be. Guest access without creating an account is offered as well, which lowers the barrier to trying it and means the first use does not hand over an email address.

Pricing, and what the developer does not publish

The free tier is quantified plainly: seven requests per week on the basic features. That is a small allowance — enough to evaluate whether the sidebar fits your habits, not enough to use daily — and above it sits a paid upgrade aimed at heavier users. The exact subscription amounts are not stated on the product site, and AlternativeTo records only that the model is subscription-based with a limited free version. Anyone budgeting for this should expect to check the price inside the Google Play listing rather than on the web page.

Several other technical details are also absent from public materials: the minimum Android version, whether the app leans on Android's accessibility service or on the media-projection screen-capture API, and which AI provider or model answers the requests. That last omission is significant. Because the assistant reads screen contents, knowing whose servers receive that text is precisely the question a cautious user would ask, and it is not answered publicly. It is a fair thing to raise with the developer before granting the app broad screen access.

Languages, reach and how new all this is

Arc advertises support for more than ten languages, naming Spanish, French, German, Hindi and Chinese among them, and the reader's automatic language detection is built for exactly the mixed-language browsing that is normal on a phone. Distribution is through the Google Play Store; there is no iOS, desktop or web version, and given how deeply the concept depends on Android's ability to draw over other apps, a port is not a trivial matter.

The AlternativeTo entry was last touched in May 2026 and carries no likes, no comments and no reviews at all, with only fourteen alternatives listed against it. In other words there is no independent user feedback to weigh — nobody has published a complaint, but nobody has vouched for it either. For a tool that asks for permission to read your screen, that absence of a track record is itself a factor in the decision, and it argues for starting with the free weekly allowance and non-sensitive apps.

Who it fits

Arc makes sense for someone who reads a lot on an Android phone and keeps performing the same three or four operations on that reading: summarise, translate, listen instead of read, draft a reply. The one-tap action model rewards people willing to spend ten minutes writing good prompts up front. It is a poor fit for anyone who works mainly on a desktop, anyone who needs the assistant inside banking or password apps — where it deliberately refuses to run — and anyone whose employer requires a named, auditable processor for text taken off the screen.

If the job you actually need done is condensing long documents rather than acting on live screens, a dedicated summarising service such as SumizAI covers that from any device without granting an app overlay permissions on your phone. Arc's argument is proximity: it is already open, on top of what you are reading, one tap away.

Product page: arcassistant.app

What SumizAI is

A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk.

A vault is a directory holding base.md, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a notes/ folder with one .md file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist.

The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used.

Every answer kept this way becomes one of these ai notes, ready to search again months later without hunting back through old chats.

Side by side

Where they differ

• Both mention AI. The difference is whose key it runs on: SumizAI never resells inference — you connect one of seven providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server) with your own API key and pay that provider directly. Check what Arc: AI Screen Assistant does with the model bill before comparing prices.
• Arc: AI Screen Assistant is freemium: there is a free tier and a paid one, and the line between them is the thing to read before committing. SumizAI has one plan at a dollar a month, so there is no feature held back for a higher tier — and an unpaid account still opens and exports every vault it already has.
• AlternativeTo's description of Arc: AI Screen Assistant does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard .md files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them.

Which one to pick