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points by ranger_danger 5 days ago | 0 comments
I just want an easy-to-use offline AI chatbot that I can converse with in Japanese to practice with at native speed.

Does this not exist yet?

[–] JoeDaDude 4 days ago
Me too! I couldn't find one so I cobbled one together. I wrote enough python for all the parts to work together. I can speak Japanese into it, it gets recognized, and - all too eagerly - the chatbot corrects my mistakes.

My stack, running locally on a Windows 10 machine: - Vosk STT augmented with vosk-model-ja-0.22 for Japanese - Gemma4 LLM running in Ollama and with customized model card to act as a Japanese tutor - Kokoro TTS using Japanese voice jf_alpha.pt and augmented with the unidic Japanese dictionary

[–] traceroute66 4 days ago
Isn't it called Mistral Voxtral 3[1]

Not that I would trust an AI chatbot with Japanese. Most online text translators can barely cope with Japanese, DeepL is the only one that provides passable results. Its a tricky language.

[1] https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-3/

[–] socalgal2 4 days ago
> Most online text translators can barely cope with Japanese

Maybe you didn't mean ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude but do you have examples of this not working with those? They work for me.

[–] kulahan 4 days ago
Wouldn’t AI be, by definition, better at translating than even a dictionary? I guess I don’t know if that translates to teaching, however.