ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-01-11
See what a character looks like
Ask ReadingRate what a character looks like, in those words, in a conversation about the book, and it searches the book's text for the passages describing them, writes a visual description grounded in those passages, then generates a portrait. Each image gets its own page you can share, and every image made from a book is collected on a gallery page for that book. It is part of membership.
Available on web and iOS.
This started as a way of settling the argument every reader has with the film adaptation. It turned out to be more useful than that, because the passages a book actually spends on a face are scattered across three hundred pages, and gathering them is work nobody does by hand.
The description is written before the picture is, and it is written out of quoted text wherever the book's text is available. That ordering is the whole point: the portrait is an argument from evidence rather than a model's impression of a famous title.
You can ask for a photographic portrait or an oil painting, and the wording of the request picks the style.
What it can't do
- Membership only. Free accounts get no AI conversations at all, and a conversation is where portraits are requested. Members get fifty images a month.
- Each image is generated independently, so the same character asked for twice will not look the same twice. There is no consistency between images.
- Where the book's text is not in ReadingRate, the description falls back on the model's general knowledge of the book, which is weaker and sometimes wrong.
- The search for describing passages is not capped at your current page, so a portrait can be informed by a chapter you have not read.
- Image pages are readable by anyone with the link. Your own gallery needs a login; the individual image pages do not.
- A model drawing a face out of prose is illustrating one reading of it. It is not evidence of anything.
Questions people ask
- Can AI show me what a book character looks like?
- Yes. In ReadingRate you ask in a conversation about the book, and the portrait is generated from the passages in that book which describe the character. It is a membership feature, limited to fifty images a month.
- Where do the images go afterwards?
- Each one gets its own shareable page, and every image made from a book appears together on that book's gallery page. Your own images are collected under Gallery.