I translate work emails in Japanese every day. For months I pasted them into Google Translate, sent the result, and learned nothing. The tool got me through the task but left no residue — I understood the output about as well as I understood the input.
The problem isn't accuracy. It's that literal translation tools give you one answer with no register, no sense of whether you're being weirdly formal or accidentally casual, no explanation of why one phrase works where another doesn't. You repeat the same transaction a hundred times and stay exactly as lost.
I built konid to close that loop. For any phrase you want to express, it returns three options ordered casual to formal, with the register explained and cultural context on the differences. The point isn't to pick one and move on — it's that seeing the range is the lesson.
Here's what that looks like for a real work scenario. Say you want to close an email with something like "please let me know if you have questions":
konid: "please let me know if you have questions" → Japanese
1. [Casual] 何かあれば連絡して — 'Let me know if anything comes up.' Peer-to-peer; fine for colleagues you know well.
2. [Neutral] ご不明な点があればお知らせください — Standard professional. Safe default for most work email.
3. [Formal] ご不明な点がございましたら、何なりとお申し付けください — Used with clients or senior external contacts. Overly stiff for internal teams.
Audio pronunciation plays directly through speakers — no external API key, uses node-edge-tts under the hood.
konid runs as an MCP server, so it sits inside Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. Install with:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
It also installs as a ChatGPT app via Developer mode using the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.
Supports 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and more. MIT licensed.
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