What can the AI transforms actually do?

Four things: summarize long text, rewrite for grammar and clarity, translate to another language, and clean up formatting artifacts. They can be chained — for example, clean then translate.

Do I need an account or subscription?

No account, and ClipHistory is a one-time $19.99 purchase with no auto-renewal. Transforms use your own API key with the provider you pick, billed by that provider.

Which providers are supported?

Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint. You can switch between them whenever you want.

Is my clipboard data uploaded anywhere?

Your history, snippets, and boards stay local. Only the text you actively run through a transform is sent, and it goes directly to your chosen AI provider under your own key.

How do I trigger a transform?

Press Cmd+Shift+V to open ClipHistory, select a clip, and choose the transform you want.

Transform Copied Text With AI on Mac

Copy-paste hasn't changed in decades: whatever you copy is exactly what you paste. AI transforms add a step in between — you copy something, reshape it, and paste the improved version. On a Mac, the natural place for that step is the clipboard manager, because everything you copy already passes through it.

This is the overview: what transforms are, the four ClipHistory ships with, how the provider setup works, and how to fit them into real work.

What a transform is

A transform takes the text on your clipboard, sends it to an AI model, and puts the result back on your clipboard. You then paste the result. ClipHistory keeps your last 150 clips, so you can run a transform on the thing you just copied or on something from earlier in your history.

The trigger is always the same: Cmd+Shift+V opens ClipHistory, you pick a clip, you choose a transform.

The four transforms

Summarize — condenses long text into its main points. Good for articles, threads, and meeting notes.
Rewrite — fixes grammar, improves clarity, and smooths phrasing. Good for your own drafts.
Translate — converts text into another language. Good for cross-language reading and writing.
Clean — strips formatting artifacts like stray line breaks, odd spacing, and leftover bullet characters. Good as a first pass on text copied from PDFs or web pages.

These compose well. Clean then Summarize on a messy PDF. Rewrite then Translate on a draft you need in another language. Each is one shortcut, and they stack.

Bring your own provider and key

Transforms run through an AI provider you choose: Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint. You supply your own API key. This design has real consequences:

No subscription markup. You pay the provider directly at their per-token rate. Short transforms cost fractions of a cent.
Model choice. Use a strong model for important writing, a cheap one for quick fixes, a large-context model for long documents.
Future-proofing. When a provider ships a better model, you switch — no waiting for the app to add support for a bundled service.
A custom endpoint option. If you run your own gateway or a self-hosted model, point ClipHistory at it.

Everything stays local except the transform request

ClipHistory has no cloud and no account. Your clip history, snippets, and boards live on your Mac. The only data that leaves is the specific text you send through a transform, and it goes directly to your chosen provider under your own key — not through any ClipHistory server, because there isn't one.

That means you control, clip by clip, what gets sent. Sensitive text you don't run a transform on never leaves your machine at all.

Fitting transforms into real work

A few patterns that come up constantly:

Reading faster

Copy a long article, run Summarize, skim the result, decide whether to read the full thing. Both versions stay in your history.

Writing cleaner

Draft quickly and sloppily, copy it, run Rewrite, paste the polished version back. Works in any app because it's clipboard-based — Mail, Slack, Notes, Xcode.

Working across languages

Copy foreign text, Translate, read it. Or write in your language, Translate, paste it into a reply. Clean first if the source is messy.

Taming pasted junk

Pasted a code block or PDF passage full of broken formatting? Clean normalizes it before you do anything else.

Keep the good stuff

Some outputs are worth reusing. Save a polished paragraph or a standard translation as a snippet to paste it instantly later without re-running the transform. Or pin a clip — pinned clips are unlimited and survive past the rolling 150-clip history, while unpinned clips roll off as new ones arrive.

A paste stack for multi-step work

When a task involves several pieces of text in sequence, the paste stack keeps them ordered. Copy several items in a row and ClipHistory queues them so you can paste through them one after another. Combined with transforms, this lets you, say, clean and translate a series of passages and paste each into place without hunting through your history for the right one.

A realistic stance on AI output

These transforms are fast and genuinely useful, but AI makes mistakes. For high-stakes text — legal, medical, financial, public-facing copy — treat the output as a strong first draft and review it before you ship. The value is speed and convenience, applied to the dozens of small text tasks you do every day.

Summary

Transforming copied text turns plain copy-paste into copy, improve, paste. Four transforms — Summarize, Rewrite, Translate, Clean — all triggered by Cmd+Shift+V, all running through the provider and model you choose with your own key, all keeping your text local except the single request you send.

Ready to put AI to work on your clipboard? Get ClipHistory for macOS — $19.99 (one-time payment, 12-month license, no auto-renewal). Signed and notarized by Apple, runs on Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 12+.