I translate work emails in Japanese every day. My Japanese is intermediate — good enough to read, not good enough to know whether my phrasing sounds like a 1990s business manual or an actual person. Google Translate gives me one answer with no indication of register, no note on whether I'm being too stiff or too casual for the relationship. I'd copy it, send it, and wonder.
konid is an MCP server I built to fix that. For any phrase, it returns three translations ordered casual to formal, with the register explained and cultural context on why the options differ. For Japanese, that means knowing the gap between ため口, 丁寧語, and ですます — not just getting a string of characters and guessing.
The audio is the other thing that mattered to me. Native pronunciation plays directly through your speakers via node-edge-tts — no API key, no browser tab, just the word or phrase said back to you in the target language. Covers 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and more.
Installs in one line for Claude Code:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
Also works in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. If you're on ChatGPT, enable Developer mode and add the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.
The three-option structure is the actual design choice. One answer teaches you nothing — you just use it and move on. Three answers ordered by register force you to understand what you're picking and why, which means the next time you're in that situation, you already know.
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