Earshot: help

Short, honest answers. If yours is not here, email me and it will be.

Getting started

Install Earshot and open discord.com in Chrome. This works in the browser, not the Discord desktop app.
Click the Earshot icon and pick the language you want messages translated into.
Open a channel where people are chatting in another language. Translations appear underneath their messages.

The first time Earshot meets a new language it downloads that language pack once, and you will see a small note at the bottom of the screen with the progress. After that it is instant, and it works even with no internet.

Nothing is happening

Open the popup first. It checks your actual browser and tells you what is wrong rather than leaving you guessing. The usual causes:

Chrome is too old. You need Chrome 138 or newer. Check chrome://settings/help.
You are on the Discord app, not the website. Extensions cannot run inside the desktop app. Use discord.com in Chrome.
Not enough disk space. Chrome requires roughly 22GB free to run its on-device models. This is Chrome's rule, not mine.
Phone or tablet. These browser APIs are desktop only for now. Nothing I can do about that yet.
The messages are already in your language. Earshot only translates what needs translating.

Some messages get skipped

On purpose, in most cases:

Very short messages. "lol", "ok", ":)" and similar are not worth it and detectors get them wrong constantly.
Code, links, mentions, emoji and slash commands are removed before translating, so a message that is only those things has nothing left to translate.
Uncertain language. If the detector is not reasonably confident, Earshot stays quiet. Saying nothing is better than confidently mistranslating someone.
Very long pastes are skipped to keep things quick.

A translation looks wrong

It sometimes will be. This is machine translation, and slang, sarcasm, gaming jargon and typos all throw it. That is exactly why the original message is always left in place directly above the translation, so you can see what was really said and judge for yourself. Treat anything important with the same caution you would give any translator.

My language is not in the list

Chrome currently supports around 39 languages for on-device translation, and the list grows over time. If yours is missing today, it may well appear in a future Chrome update without me doing anything.

Does it slow Discord down

It should not. Translation happens on your own machine, results are cached so repeated messages cost nothing, and only messages that are actually on your screen get processed. If you do notice a slowdown, tell me, because that is a bug rather than a fact of life.

What Earshot will never do: touch your message box, send anything, react to anything, or do anything at all to your Discord account. It reads what is on screen. That is the entire scope, and it is deliberate, because every other translator's reviews are full of people complaining about broken slash commands and hijacked typing.

Your data

There is none to worry about. Nothing is collected and nothing is sent anywhere, because there is no server involved at any point. Details in the privacy policy.

Still stuck

Email simi.enquiries@gmail.com. Bug reports genuinely welcome, this gets better every time someone tells me what it got wrong. If Earshot got you into a conversation you would have missed, a coffee makes my week.