waxberry-dev/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 _translated.wav next to the original, and plays it automatically.
**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:
Or install globally:
**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
Restart Claude Desktop. You'll see live-translate appear in the tools panel.
---
Claude Code setup
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) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |