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Kagi Translate

blog.kagi.com

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41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Kagi Translate

#41

Post by epoxia »

ohmahjong wrote: post #7

Disclaimer: I am already a Kagi customer. At least for Afrikaans I'm not impressed here. There are some inaccuracies, like "varktone" becoming "pork rinds" instead of "pig toes" and also some censorship ("jou ma se poes" does NOT mean "play with my cat"!). Comparing directly against Google Translate, Google nails everything I threw at it. I didn't see any option to provide feedback, suggested translations, etc, but I…

I asked some inappropriate things and it was "translated" to I cannot assist with that request. It definitely needs to be more clear when it's refusing to translate. But, then again, I don't even use kagi.

Re: Kagi Translate

#42

Post by Aachen »

freediver wrote: post #38
Aachen wrote: post #22

I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer. There is no captcha that I could get wrong, just a checkbox that probably uses a black box model to classify me automatically Was curious after the post claimed that the quality is better than Google and DeepL, but the current top comment showed translations from Afrikaans that it got wrong but I could understand as a Dutch person who doesn't even sp…

> I can't use it because I'm not classified as "human" by a computer. It uses Cloudflare Turnstile captcha. The service shows no captcha to logged in Kagi users, so you can just create a (trial) Kagi account.

Thanks, but I am logged in and it still shows that. Clicking log in at the top of the page leads me to the login page which takes about 10 seconds to (while I'm typing) realise that I'm already logged in and then redirects me to the homepage (kagi search)

I don't have any site-specific settings and clearly HN works fine (as well as other sites) so it's not that cookies are disabled or such

Edit: come to think of it, I'm surprised that you find translator data to be more sensitive (worth sticking behind a gatekeeper) than user logins. Must have been a lot of work to develop this intellectual property. There is no Cloudflare check on the login page. Not that I'd want to give you ideas, though! :-)

Re: Kagi Translate

#43

Post by freediver »

dlkmp wrote: post #12

Just as a quick usability feedback: As long as Deepl translates asynchronously as I type, while Kagi requires a full form send & page refresh, I am not inclined to switch (translation quality is also already too good for my language pairs to consider switching for minor improvements, but the usability/ speed is the real feature here). This is coming from a user with existing Kagi Ultimate subscription, so I'm general…

> As long as Deepl translates asynchronously as I type, while Kagi requires a full form send & page refresh,

This leads to increased cost and we wanted to keep service free. But yes we will introduce translate as your type (will be limited to paid Kagi members).

Re: Kagi Translate

#44

Post by freediver »

gen3 wrote: post #4

Has anyone seen info on how this works? "It’s not revolutionary" seems like an understatement when you can do better then DeepL and support more languages then google?

It uses a combination of LLMs, selecting the best output. (from the blog post)

Re: Kagi Translate

#45

Post by gen3 »

freediver wrote: post #44
gen3 wrote: post #4

Has anyone seen info on how this works? "It’s not revolutionary" seems like an understatement when you can do better then DeepL and support more languages then google?

It uses a combination of LLMs, selecting the best output. (from the blog post)

Ah, I missed that. Thank you!

Re: Kagi Translate

#46

Post by exi1up »

I could be missing something, but is there some sort of metric for these comparisons to other software? Like the BLEU score which I've seen in studies relating to comparing LLMs to Google Translate. I find it difficult to believe it is better than DeepL in a vacuum.

Re: Kagi Translate

#47

Post by GaggiX »

epoxia wrote: post #41
ohmahjong wrote: post #7

Disclaimer: I am already a Kagi customer. At least for Afrikaans I'm not impressed here. There are some inaccuracies, like "varktone" becoming "pork rinds" instead of "pig toes" and also some censorship ("jou ma se poes" does NOT mean "play with my cat"!). Comparing directly against Google Translate, Google nails everything I threw at it. I didn't see any option to provide feedback, suggested translations, etc, but I…

I asked some inappropriate things and it was "translated" to I cannot assist with that request. It definitely needs to be more clear when it's refusing to translate. But, then again, I don't even use kagi.

Maybe they are using Claude API for the translation, Claude models are really good multilingual models.

EDIT: the "Limitations" section report the use of LLMs without specifying the models used.

Re: Kagi Translate

#48

Post by Aachen »

erinnh wrote: post #40

Kagi develops lots of features, but they seem to often be quarter-baked. Maps for example is basically unusable and has been for a while. (at least in Germany) Trying to search for an address often leads Kagi maps to go to a different random address. Still love the search, but Id love for Kagi to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Where do I find the map feature?

I'm curious to see if I can identify what data source and search software it is based on, since I've heard similar complaints about Nominatim and it is indeed finicky if you made a typo or don't know the exact address; it does no context search based on the current view afaik. Google really does do search well compared to the open source software I'm partial to, I gotta give them that

Edit: ah if you horizontally scroll on the homepage there's a "search maps" thing. Putting in a street name near me that's unique in the world, it comes up with a lookalike name in another country. Definitely not any OpenStreetMap-based product I know of then, they usually aren't unliteral like that. Since the background map is Apple by default, I guess that's what the search is as well

Re: Kagi Translate

#49

Post by Aachen »

jsheard wrote: post #10
ks2048 wrote: post #6

> Limitations > We do not translate dynamically created content ... What does that mean?

I assume it means they only translate what's in the HTML, not anything that's added via Javascript later.

Is that a relevant username, or is J your initial? I can't quite place what "JavaScript heard" would mean. I've wondered before but there's no contact in your profile and now it felt at least somewhat related to the comment itself, sorry for being mostly off-topic

Re: Kagi Translate

#50

Post by freediver »

erinnh wrote: post #40

Kagi develops lots of features, but they seem to often be quarter-baked. Maps for example is basically unusable and has been for a while. (at least in Germany) Trying to search for an address often leads Kagi maps to go to a different random address. Still love the search, but Id love for Kagi to concentrate on one thing at a time.

We are focusing most our resources on search (which I hope you can agree, we are doing a pretty good job at). And it turns out search is not enough and you need other things - like maps (or a browser, because some browsers will not let you change search engine and our paid users can not use the service). Both are also incredibly hard to do right. If it appears quarter-baked (and I am first to say that we can and will definetely keep imporivng improving with our products), it is not for the lack of trying or ambition but the lack of resources. Kagi is 100% user-funded. So we need users, and we sometimes work on tools that do not bring us money directly, but bring us users (like Small Web, Universal Summarizer or Translate). It is all part of the plan. And it is a decade-long plan.
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