About This Software

Read and understand anything on your screen

LingoHUD is a translation overlay for Windows. Press a hotkey and the text on your screen — game menus, quests, multiplayer chat, manga bubbles, video subtitles, websites — is translated and drawn right over the original. Turn game or video audio into live translated subtitles, or speak and let LingoHUD type for you in another language.

Everything core runs locally on your PC. No account, no API key, no subscription. Online translation is there if you want it, never forced.

✨ New in 1.1

• Hy-MT2 local AI translation — a stronger offline translator for 38 languages, with automatic local backups for everything else.
  
• Bring your own local model — load a compatible GGUF file, or connect LM Studio or Ollama running on your own PC.
  
• Voice typing — hold a key, speak, and get your words translated into the clipboard, typed into the active window, or spoken into a virtual microphone.
  
• Publisher captions — show what you say as live subtitles on stream through a dedicated OBS window and a text file.
  
• Better manga — speech and narration detection, clean white boxes over the source text, and translations that stay until the page changes.
  
• Smoother live subtitles — faster start, wrapped long lines, and fewer "phantom" lines from silence or music.
  
• Searchable settings, cleaner language lists and a quick menu on the floating bubble.

📸 Screen translation — F6 and F5

Press F6 to translate the whole screen, or F5 to drag a box around just the part you care about. The text is read with OCR and the translation is placed over the source text, matched to its position.

Pick a profile for what you're looking at:

• General — menus, dialogue, quests, websites, apps
  
• Game Chat — keeps every chat message on its own line, so different players are never merged into one sentence
  
• Video / Subtitle — focused on the subtitle strip at the bottom of the screen
  
• Manga / Comics — speech bubble detection with a dedicated Japanese manga OCR

The source language can be detected automatically, and Auto / Mixed mode handles screens that mix scripts — English, Russian, Japanese and Chinese side by side in the same chat box. Text that is already in your own language is left alone.

Don't want to press a key for every new line? Continuous mode watches the screen: changed text is re-translated, unchanged text stays as it is, and text that disappears is removed. Choose Fast, Balanced or Light scanning to fit your PC and your game.

The Manga profile finds speech bubbles and narration boxes, reads vertical Japanese with MangaOCR, and covers the original text with clean, readable translations that stay on screen until you turn the page. Partly hidden or cut-off bubbles are skipped instead of guessed.

🎙️ Live audio subtitles — F8

Press F8 and LingoHUD listens to your system audio — games, videos, streams, voice chat. Speech is transcribed with local Whisper models, translated, and shown in a subtitle strip you can move and style. Choose Fast, Balanced or More Accurate recognition, show the original next to the translation, and set position, size and how long lines stay on screen.

⌨️ Voice typing

Hold your push-to-talk key (Right Shift by default, fully remappable), press F9, or click the mic on the floating bubble, then say your sentence. LingoHUD transcribes and translates it, then delivers it where you choose:

• Clipboard — paste it anywhere
  
• Direct typing — typed into the window you were using. Requires your consent, and LingoHUD never presses Enter for you
  
• Speak it — read aloud into a virtual microphone so teammates in voice chat hear the translation (needs a virtual audio cable such as VB-CABLE, installed separately)

An optional preview lets you check and edit the text before it goes out. Voice typing only listens when you ask it to — never in the background.

📺 Publisher captions for streamers

Turn on publisher captions and everything you say appears as live, optionally translated subtitles. Add the dedicated LingoHUD OBS window as a Window Capture source, or point a Text source at the caption file. Voice typing and publisher captions are fully independent — use either, both, or neither. Both are off by default.

🧠 Translation engines — your choice

• Hy-MT2 — local AI translation on your PC, 38 languages
  
• M2M-100 — lightweight local engine for modest PCs
  
• MADLAD-400 — local backup for languages Hy-MT2 doesn't cover
  
• Google Translate — optional online engine. Only the recognized text is sent, never your screenshot
  
• Your own local model — a compatible GGUF file, or LM Studio / Ollama on your own machine

Switch engines in one place in Settings. If an engine can't handle a language pair, LingoHUD falls back to a local engine instead of leaving you with nothing.

🧰 More tools

• F10 text translator window and Ctrl+Shift+V clipboard translation
  
• Video → SRT — create subtitle files from video files
  
• Smart Box (F12) — quickly target one block of text or one manga bubble
  
• Floating bubble — one-click access to screen translation, audio, voice typing and settings, with a right-click quick menu. Hide it if you prefer hotkeys
  
• Every hotkey can be remapped

🌍 Languages

Translate between 105 languages, 86 of which can be read directly from the screen (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic script, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and more). The app itself is available in 11 languages: English, Türkçe, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português do Brasil, Русский, 日本語, 한국어, 简体中文 and العربية.

🔒 Privacy

• Screen text recognition and speech recognition run on your PC
  
• No account, no telemetry, no analytics
  
• Data only leaves your PC when you choose an online option: Google Translate (recognized text only) or the online voice for read-aloud
  
• Recognized passwords, API keys and tokens are masked before translation where they can be detected

⚙️ Made to fit your PC

No graphics card required — LingoHUD also runs on the CPU. With an NVIDIA GPU, OCR, speech recognition and translation are accelerated with CUDA. Choose Game Priority, Balanced or Translation Priority, and LingoHUD frees memory from models you aren't using.

⚠️ Good to know

• Use Borderless Window or Windowed mode in games. Some exclusive-fullscreen games hide overlays.
  
• Machine translation can get meaning or names wrong. Japanese → Turkish is still experimental.
  
• Very small or heavily stylized fonts are harder to read. Continuous mode is the least mature feature and uses more CPU.
  
• The first time a model loads can take a few seconds. Everything is slower on CPU-only PCs.
  
• Speech recognition works best with a clear microphone and little background music.

🚧 Early Access, built solo

LingoHUD is built by one independent developer and updated regularly. Your feedback in the Steam discussions decides what gets improved next.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

LingoHUD's output is strictly limited to language translation and speech-to-text
transcription of content already present on the user's screen or audio. It does not
generate creative, original, or open-ended content.

Content moderation: The translation and recognition models process only user-initiated
input that the user explicitly captures via a hotkey. The software does not produce
novel content; it converts existing content from one language to another, or from
speech and images to text. All processing is deterministic and bounded to the captured
input.

New in 1.1: you can add your own local translation or speech-recognition model; it runs only on your PC. Optional voice typing and virtual-microphone speech use only your own microphone speech and only when you press the push-to-talk key or click the microphone button.