this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
19 points (91.3% liked)

F-Droid

8620 readers
1 users here now

F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.

Website | GitLab | Mastodon

Matrix space | forum | IRC

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Found Translate You for text translation, but it uses online services. Is there any offline app for that?

Sayboard allows offline speech to text translation. It's quite cool.
It supports English and seems useful.
Was looking to see if there are models for Malayalam and other languages.

Saw a Malayalam vosk GMM model in gitlab. Tho, it can't be imported. It seems to need a chain training model.

Does anyone know any resources on that?
Or any other app that can do it?

Or is there some way using Termux or so?

all 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ashema@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Firefox has an offline translation feature. You can translate web pages or arbitrary text by entering "about:translations" in the address bar. Maybe someone can confirm if this works in Fennec too?

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 month ago

I did not know about (heh) about:translations! Holy shit thanks!

[–] Achyu@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thank you.

But it doesn't seem to have Malayalam

[–] ashema@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

Sorry about that. Hope it will be added soon!

[–] pirat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Thinking a bit outside the box, if your phone is capable of it, you could find a way to run a small local LLM on it. Maybe it can even be done in Termux?

If that's not an option and/or you need a bigger, more capable model, you could host a local Ollama instance, and connect to it from the Ollama (IzzyOnDroid) or GPTMobile (F-Droid). This way you will only connect to yourself instead of some 3rd party translation or LLM provider.

I think that, with a well-written system prompt, you could make it more efficient by concisely instructing it to expect your text input and a language (or include permanent language instructions in system prompt), to then only output the translated version of your input in that language. This will keep the number of input+output tokens low, thereby saving some inference. You can also get creative and instruct it to output multiple variations, change the style/tone/formatting, provide an example sentence containing a single translated word, etc...

[–] Fake4000@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

Have you tried using the futo keyboard app?

Supposedly does everything offline locally.