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Installation

What you need

  • Python 3.12 or newer (download)

  • uv — fast Python package manager. Install with:

    curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

    powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

  • An LLM API key — any of:

    • Google Gemini (free tier available — recommended for getting started)
    • Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenAI, Anthropic via proxy, local Ollama / LM Studio, etc.)

Optional, but unlocks more features

Tool Used by When you need it
FFmpeg (download) Subtitle, Voice, Dubbing, Live Any audio/video workflow
LibreOffice (download) Office formats on Linux/macOS Translating legacy .doc / .xls / .ppt, or any Office file when MS Office isn't installed
Tesseract (install guide) OCR engine (default) Extract Text page, scanned-PDF translation, embedded-image translation
MS Office + pywin32 Office on Windows Highest fidelity Office translation on Windows

You can install AI Translate without any of these — features that need them will tell you so before they fail.

Set it up

git clone https://github.com/cadic2603/ai-translate.git
cd ai-translate
uv sync

That installs everything needed to run the desktop app, the CLI, and the MCP server.

Run it

uv run python -m src.main

uv run ait --version

uv run ait-mcp           # stdio transport (for Claude Desktop / Code)

Add your API key

The first time you open the desktop app:

  1. Click Settings in the sidebar
  2. Open the LLM tab
  3. Paste your Google Gemini API key (or configure a custom OpenAI-compatible provider). Enterprise users can flip Gemini to Vertex AI mode instead — point it at a GCP project and region, optionally supply a service-account JSON path; see LLM Providers for the details.
  4. Pick a default model — any current Flash variant (e.g. gemini-2.5-flash) is a solid free starting point. Pro variants give better quality at higher cost.
  5. Close Settings — you're done

Keys are stored in your OS keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, GNOME / KDE Secret Service on Linux), not in plain text on disk.

Headless / server install

If you can't run the desktop app to set up keys, see LLM Providers for the keychain CLI commands.

Next: take it for a spin

5-minute first translation →