I was drafting a message to my girlfriend in Farsi — something small, just that I'd thought about her during the day. Google Translate gave me a sentence. It was technically correct. It also sounded like a form letter.

The problem isn't accuracy. It's that human speech has registers, and a single translation collapses them all into one. "I missed you" said to a partner at the end of a long day sounds different from the same phrase in a formal letter, even in English. In Farsi, Japanese, or Korean, getting that wrong doesn't just sound odd — it signals that you didn't bother to learn how the language actually works.

So I built konid. It returns three options per query, ordered casual to formal, with the register explained and cultural context for why each version lands the way it does.…