A powerful macOS application that automatically translates Korean messages from KakaoTalk into English in real-time. This project was born out of the frustration of manually copying and pasting messages for translation, providing a seamless solution for bilingual communication.
Want a deep dive into the motivation, technical details, and future plans for this project? Check out the detailed blog post:
Read the KakaoTalk Translation Agent Blog Post
Below is a screenshot of the application's user interface:
See the app in action:
Want to watch the full demo video with sound? Click here to watch on YouTube
- Real-time Translation: Automatically captures and translates new KakaoTalk messages
- Smart Window Detection: Identifies and processes multiple KakaoTalk chat windows
- Duplicate Prevention: Intelligently filters out duplicate messages
- Persistent Storage: Saves chat history and translations for future reference
- Modern UI: Clean and intuitive interface with a split-view design
- Unread Message Tracking: Keeps track of new messages with unread counts
Before this application, users had to:
- Manually copy each Korean message
- Open a translation service
- Paste and translate
- Copy the translation back
- Repeat for every message
This process was time-consuming and disrupted the natural flow of conversation. The Translation Agent solves this by automating the entire process, allowing users to focus on the conversation rather than the translation mechanics.
The application is built using SwiftUI and follows the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture pattern:
Translator-Agent/
├── Views/
│ ├── ContentView.swift
│ └── ChatDetailView.swift
├── ViewModels/
│ ├── ScreenshotViewModel.swift
│ └── ChatListViewModel.swift
├── Services/
│ ├── ScreenCaptureService.swift
│ ├── OpenAIVisionService.swift
│ └── StorageService.swift
└── Models/
└── Chat.swift
-
Screen Capture Service
- Captures KakaoTalk windows using macOS screen capture APIs
- Intelligently crops and processes window regions
-
OpenAI Vision Service
- Utilizes OpenAI's Vision API for text extraction and translation
- Handles both Korean text recognition and English translation
-
Storage Service
- Manages persistent storage of chat history
- Implements efficient data serialization and deserialization
-
Screenshot ViewModel
- Core business logic for message processing
- Handles window detection, message filtering, and chat updates
- Implements duplicate detection using Levenshtein distance
graph TD
A[Capture Screen] --> B[Detect KakaoTalk Windows]
B --> C[Crop Window Regions]
C --> D[Extract Text via OpenAI]
D --> E[Translate to English]
E --> F[Filter Duplicates]
F --> G[Update Chat History]
G --> H[Save to Storage]
- Uses Levenshtein distance algorithm for message similarity
- 90% similarity threshold for duplicate detection
- Considers sender information in duplicate checking
- Efficient window detection using CGWindowList APIs
- Smart caching of translations
- Asynchronous processing of messages
- Optimized UI updates with minimal redraws
- Secure storage of API keys
- Local storage of chat history
- No data transmission to third parties except for translation
- Clone the repository
- Open
Translator-Agent.xcodeprojin Xcode - Add your OpenAI API key in the configuration
- Build and run the application
- macOS 13.0 or later
- Xcode 15.0 or later
- OpenAI API key
- KakaoTalk desktop application
Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
To use this application, you need to set up your OpenAI API key. There are two ways to do this:
Set the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable:
export OPENAI_API_KEY='your-api-key-here'You can set the API key programmatically in development:
AppConfig.setAPIKey("your-api-key-here")