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May. 20th, 2026 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavgiven google's recent moves (ditching search for AI, invasive gmail changes), i'm hitting fast forward on removing google entirely from my few use-cases.
ironically the hardest two things to replace:
1) google meets specifically due to close captioning. (proton meets is awesome and has been working for me in the recent past but damn, i really miss/use my close captioning even if the google text accuracy has gotten noticeably god awful lately. :c ) i would love hearing if there's a non big-tech alternative to meetings-specific captioning (that's not basic assistive tech tools; i've been aware of those).
2) google translate. i'll pay (and have paid) for human translators for longer more important chunks of text, but for quick one-off replies to JP social media accounts (and to double check game scripts and JP artbooks), this works in a pinch.
that said, a few startpage searches later i did find a few options! while none of them are completely AI-free, some of these have offline, open source local options, and smell much more like the old school machine translation (that existed ten-fifteen years ago) versus the inaccurate slop fetes of today.
- libretranslate (web version) powered by argos translate (offline, technical version). file translation available. free, but with more custom bells and whistles available at a price (eg, custom models).
- apertium - read somewhere that it's more rules-based versus pure machine learning based. specific language pairs may be very limited depending on how similar they are. document & web-page translation options available. free, open source.
- linux live captioning - borderline assistive tech (not a bad thing; just trying to keep focus narrow here) but worth mentioning if you're like me on linux and looking for a hybrid of options to paste together. this plus proton meets looks promising with no (unnecessary) data sent elsewhere.
happy to hear more options, or amends to these ~
ironically the hardest two things to replace:
1) google meets specifically due to close captioning. (proton meets is awesome and has been working for me in the recent past but damn, i really miss/use my close captioning even if the google text accuracy has gotten noticeably god awful lately. :c ) i would love hearing if there's a non big-tech alternative to meetings-specific captioning (that's not basic assistive tech tools; i've been aware of those).
2) google translate. i'll pay (and have paid) for human translators for longer more important chunks of text, but for quick one-off replies to JP social media accounts (and to double check game scripts and JP artbooks), this works in a pinch.
that said, a few startpage searches later i did find a few options! while none of them are completely AI-free, some of these have offline, open source local options, and smell much more like the old school machine translation (that existed ten-fifteen years ago) versus the inaccurate slop fetes of today.
- libretranslate (web version) powered by argos translate (offline, technical version). file translation available. free, but with more custom bells and whistles available at a price (eg, custom models).
- apertium - read somewhere that it's more rules-based versus pure machine learning based. specific language pairs may be very limited depending on how similar they are. document & web-page translation options available. free, open source.
- linux live captioning - borderline assistive tech (not a bad thing; just trying to keep focus narrow here) but worth mentioning if you're like me on linux and looking for a hybrid of options to paste together. this plus proton meets looks promising with no (unnecessary) data sent elsewhere.
happy to hear more options, or amends to these ~
