Meloa — Talu reads it with you

Softens anxiety-inducing headlines, text and images, and offers to go through heavy emails together with Talu from Meloa.

Meloa's extension blurs upsetting headlines, paragraphs and photos on news sites, and tense subject lines in Gmail, so you can decide what to read and when. On news sites, anything that reads as upsetting is blurred where it sits. Nothing is removed or rewritten. Every blurred item has a Show button. The Meloa icon in your toolbar has a switch that turns all of it off, or back on. It works on major news sites as soon as you install it. For any other site, open it, click the Meloa icon and choose "Soften this site". You give access one site at a time, and you can take it back the same way. It never asks for access to your whole browser. In Gmail, a subject line that reads as tense is blurred before you open it. Inside, the message stays blurred, with a short note saying what kind of hard it looks like: health, money, housing, work, or news about someone. From there you can read it, read it with Talu, or leave it for now. The note comes from matching words on your own computer, so it is never a summary of the email. The extension doesn't delete, archive or mark anything as read. You can also highlight text on any page, right-click, and choose "Go through this with Talu". Talu is the dolphin from the Meloa app, and the text opens in your own signed-in Meloa account. What stays on your computer The extension decides what looks heavy using a word list that ships inside it and runs in your browser. Meloa never receives the pages you read or your email, and there's no analytics, tracking or remote code involved. The only text that leaves your computer is something you choose to go through with Talu, and it goes to your own Meloa account. What it costs The blurring is free, with or without an account, however much you use it. Going through something with Talu needs a Meloa account with Premium. The extension tells you which applies before you click. Meloa is a calendar that leaves room before and after the things you're dreading, then asks how they actually went. meloa.io