Kerog: Tibetan Offline

KEROG (Tibetan: skad sgyur rogs pa) — the translator's friend. Not the translator. Every Tibetan word, glossed, in your pocket. Web translators running in the cloud handle whole sentences better, and with a good signal they are worth using. Kerog is for when you do not have one: travelling on little or no data, talking with the people around you, a voice note that has just arrived. THE GLOSS Let it listen, share a voice note in, or photograph a page. Every sentence comes apart into its words, each with its senses from ten Tibetan dictionaries — Rangjung Yeshe, Ives Waldo, Jim Valby, Dan Martin, Tsepak Rigdzin and more, 265,000 entries bundled. Tap a word for the full entry, every dictionary named, including the ones that disagree. A rough English translation comes with it. When a sentence comes out wrong, the gloss is what lets you see why. WHY IT EXISTS I built it to understand my Lama. He sends voice notes on WhatsApp, and photographs of pages, and nothing on the phone read Tibetan. So Kerog is built around that gesture: hold down a voice note or a photo, share it in, read it. WHO IT IS FOR People with some Tibetan, or working at getting some — at home with a teacher, or on the road with the people they meet. It is not a way around the language; it is a way to stay with it. EVERYTHING HAPPENS ON THIS PHONE Listening, reading pages, translating, speaking and the dictionary all run on the device. No account, no server. Nothing you record, type or photograph leaves the phone, and all of it works in aeroplane mode. EXPECT THE TRANSLATION TO GET THINGS WRONG The models are chosen to fit on a phone, and it shows. Names, rare spellings and long sentences are where they fail. Read the English as a rough first pass — the gloss underneath is what to check it against. THE MODES Audio — record, or share in a voice note from WhatsApp, Messages or Files. Play it back and the sentence being spoken lights up. Listen — live. Transcribes and translates while someone is still talking. Each line keeps its audio, so any sentence replays on its own. Photo — photograph a page, or share one in. Its edges are found for you, with a crop you can drag and a dial that straightens the lines. Then it is read line by line. Text — type or paste Tibetan, or English. Look up — the dictionary alone. Search in Tibetan script, Wylie or phonetics, or say the word out loud; the field works out which it was given. Audio, Listen and Text run both ways: Tibetan to English and back. IT IS EDITABLE Fix a syllable, tap away, and that sentence re-translates and re-glosses itself around the correction. SPEAKING Any line can be read aloud, at three paces. Slow stretches the syllables without dropping the pitch — useful while you learn to hear where one word ends. Type English and play it back in Tibetan to the person in front of you. MORE ACCURATE WITH THE CLOUD (MONLAM AI) When you do have a connection, cloud models are far larger than anything that fits on a phone. In Settings, choose which tasks go to the Cloud — audio, translation, pages — leaving the rest on the phone. It uses monlam.ai's public service, so there is no key to obtain and no account to make, and nothing promises it will be there: when it is busy or gone, the phone takes the task back. Every switch is off until you turn it on, and what gets sent is spelled out before you do. The gloss and the dictionary never leave the phone whatever the switches say. The app is complete with all of them off, which is how it arrives. A ONE-PERSON PROJECT No advertising, no analytics, no accounts, nothing measured and nothing sold on. Kerog is written by one person for a community that no larger effort is likely to serve, and it is meant to stay that way. Open models for Tibetan are improving quickly. New ones are tested against this app as they appear, and anything better than what is bundled replaces it.