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Comment by e2le | Hacker News Reader

Of all the AI features added recently, local translations is one that I would be OK with being enabled by default. It's useful, and its value proposition is much less dubious.

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I don't like how translation is only unavailable when the browser "thinks" the whole site is in a particular language. What if there's a single sentence that's not? Or if it guesses the site's language incorrectly? No translation for you.

We need more control over the feature. Even just the ability to select text, right click, and have a "Translation" menu would be huge. Looks like there is such a feature, but it doesn't let you pick the language pairs, which is the most basic requirement of translation.

My version of Firefox (146.0 on Debian) has exactly this. If I select a sentence and right-click, I get the menu item "Translate selection to <LANGUAGE>". In the resulting box, I can change the language pair - but the defaults that I have seen were also reasonable.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation has the text: "A new Translate selection feature has been added starting in Firefox version 128, that enables you to highlight and translate selected text."

Edit: Sorry, I misread the comment to say that there was no such menu item. Edited to reflect this.

before Firefox put it in the browser, the kinda finicky extension (which I still have installed) does in fact have this feature. highlight a work and you can translate specific passages.

I had to use it a couple times recently in Firefox on Android, and it's a nice thing to have.

The UX is not polished, and not responsive. No indicator that translation is happening, then the interface disappears for the translation to materialize, with multisecond delays. All understandable if the model is churning my mobile CPU, but it needs a clear visual insicator that something happening

Yes but local translation already is in Firefox and it's already made with some kind of AI model. Nobody complained about that.

What about voice to text, text to voice, alt text generation for images that dont have them. Search suggestions, auto correct, malicious website detection.

Those are all features using AI and features I consider to be useful

What are all the recent AI features? Because I ever only noticed the local translation, and can't find anything else by looking at the menu.

EDIT: Oh, I've found a context menu item-list.

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