When one translation isn't enough to say something real

I was drafting a message to my girlfriend in Farsi — something simple, 'I missed you today' — and every tool I tried gave me one answer, flat, no context. No way to know if it read as a text message or a formal letter. No audio. Just a string of characters I had to trust.

That's the gap konid fills. You give it a phrase in any of 13+ languages (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and others), and it returns three versions ordered casual to formal, each with a note explaining the register difference and where you'd actually use it. Then it plays the pronunciation through your speakers via node-edge-tts — no external API key, no copy-pasting into another tab.

The difference in practice: if you ask for 'I missed you today' in Japanese, you don't get a single romanized phrase. You get the casual form you'd send a partner, the neutral form you might use with a close friend, and the formal register — with notes on why each lands differently. That context is what makes the translation useful instead of just technically correct.

It runs as an MCP server, so it integrates directly into Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code Copilot, Zed, and JetBrains. One command:

claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai

Also works as a ChatGPT app via Developer mode at https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.

I use it most for the messages that matter — the ones where sounding like a phrasebook is the one thing you can't afford.

https://github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning