Show HN: GameTran – Your language assistant in computer games

2 points

6 months ago

About a year ago I had an idea and I've been very slowly iterating since then. Imagine you play a game in a foreign language that you don't know very well (e.g. you're learning). You see an unknown word in a dialog. You hit a hot key and then: 1. The game is paused. 2. Over the game window an overlay is drawn. On this overlay, the text from the screen is recognized. 3. You can select a word or a phrase and get their translation, ask ChatGPT to explain it, or open Wiktionary. 4. Then you press Esc and continue playing.

There's only one catch: you need to give it a Google Cloud API key, because it uses its OCR and language services. However, what a single person may use, it'd most likely be in the free tier range and would cost $0.00/month. So it's mostly an inconvenience.

It works on Windows and also X11 Linux. Not on Wayland or Mac, for now. Nothing fundamentally impossible there, I just need to test and polish the rough edges.

It's open source, GPL-3.0.

And if you care, it's not Electron, it's Qt. Nowadays we should frugal with RAM :)