live-translate-mcp

Real-time English ↔ Mandarin speech translation for Claude — powered by Whisper, Claude AI, and Piper TTS.

Give Claude the ability to listen, translate, and speak. live-translate-mcp is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that adds speech translation as a native tool inside Claude Desktop and Claude Code. Hand it an audio file, and it transcribes, translates, synthesises, and plays the result — entirely on your machine, with Claude handling the translation.

What it does

| Step | Technology | Where it runs | |------|-----------|---------------| | Speech → Text | OpenAI Whisper (via @huggingface/transformers) | Local | | Text → Translation | Claude (Opus 4.8) | Anthropic API | | Translation → Speech | Piper TTS (ONNX) | Local |

Audio never leaves your machine except for the translated text sent to the Claude API. ASR and TTS run fully on-device.

Tools

translate_file

Translate a WAV audio file. Pass an absolute path — the server transcribes it, translates the text via Claude, synthesises speech, saves <name>_translated.wav next to the original, and plays it automatically.

Translate /Users/alice/meeting_clip.wav

Returns: original text, translation, and the path to the saved output file.

translate_speech

Translate raw audio passed as a base64-encoded WAV string. Returns the transcription, translation, and synthesised audio as base64 WAV — useful for programmatic workflows.

health_check

Verify that all dependencies (Whisper model cache, Piper voice files, espeak-ng) are present and ready before making a translation request.

Installation

No installation required. Run it directly with npx:

npx -y live-translate-mcp

Or install globally:

npm install -g live-translate-mcp

Prerequisites:

• Node.js 18+
• An Anthropic API key
• espeak-ng — for TTS phonemisation (brew install espeak-ng on macOS, apt install espeak-ng on Linux)

The Whisper model (~150 MB) and Piper voice models (~200 MB) download automatically on first use and are cached in ~/.live-translate/.

Claude Desktop setup

Add the following to your Claude Desktop configuration file:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "live-translate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "live-translate-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You'll see live-translate appear in the tools panel.

Claude Code setup

claude mcp add live-translate -- npx -y live-translate-mcp

Then set your API key in the environment before starting Claude Code, or pass it via the MCP env config.

Usage examples

Once configured, just ask Claude naturally:

"Translate this audio file for me: /Users/alice/recording.wav"

"Use translate_file on /tmp/interview.wav"

"Check if live-translate is ready"

Claude will call the appropriate tool automatically.

Supported languages

| Language | ASR | Translation | TTS | |----------|-----|-------------|-----| | English | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Mandarin Chinese (普通话) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |

Language is detected automatically from the audio — no need to specify it.

How it compares

| | live-translate-mcp | Cloud speech APIs | |--|--|--| | ASR | Local (Whisper) | Remote | | Translation | Claude API | Remote | | TTS | Local (Piper) | Remote | | Audio privacy | Audio stays on device | Audio uploaded | | Cost | Claude API only | Per-minute pricing | | Offline | Partially (ASR + TTS) | No |

Environment variables

| Variable | Default | Description | |----------|---------|-------------| | ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | — | Required. Your Anthropic API key. | | PIPER_VOICE_DIR | ~/.live-translate/voices | Path to Piper .onnx voice files. |

Related

• live-translate — the standalone CLI for push-to-talk translation with no API key required, using local models end-to-end.
• Model Context Protocol — the open standard this server implements.
• Piper TTS — the local TTS engine powering speech synthesis.

Licence

MIT