What's New
Bing Translator — free cloud translation for LOCAL_INFERENCE
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New translation engine alongside Edge TTS. Select "Bing Translator (Online)" in the translation model list — no download required, no API key. With Bing + Edge TTS + any sherpa-onnx streaming ASR you get a fully-free, cloud-backed translation pipeline with minimal local CPU/GPU use.
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High quality. Bing's web translator now backs its responses with an LLM (
usedLLM: truein responses), so output is noticeably better than older NMT. -
Auto-selectable as a fallback. Like Edge TTS on the audio side, Bing Translator is picked automatically when you have no local translation model downloaded (Opus-MT / Qwen). If a local model is available, your existing selection still wins.
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Language pairs. Bing supports the common pairs (en ↔ ja/zh/ko/fr/de/es/…) plus many more — the full list lives in
BING_SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES. Norwegiannois automatically mapped to Bing'snb. Unsupported pairs fall through to your next-best option.
Why this matters
Opus-MT costs ~110 MB per language pair; Qwen 3.5 demands WebGPU plus real GPU memory. For low-end devices or trial use, Bing keeps ASR and TTS in their existing shapes (local sherpa-onnx + Edge TTS) while offloading just the translation step to a free cloud endpoint.
Platform behavior
- Desktop app (Electron): works out of the box.
- Browser extension (Chrome/Edge 116+): works out of the box. Header-rewriting rules only apply to requests the extension itself issues, so your own bing.com tabs are unaffected.
Compatibility
- Chrome / Edge / Chromium 116+ (extension)
- Desktop app: Windows / macOS / Linux (AppImage + deb)
Full Changelog: v0.20.1...v0.21.0