Google's Creative Lab just dropped something that feels like a prop from a sci-fi film: a handheld, completely offline voice translation device you can build yourself. Gemma Translator is an open-source project that combines a Raspberry Pi 5, off-the-shelf components, and a stack of on-device AI models to translate speech between languages -- no internet, no API keys, no cloud bill.

The project is available right now on GitHub, free to clone and build. The hardware bill of materials is intentionally approachable: a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM, a portable battery pack, a small touchscreen display, a mini speaker, and a micro keyboard with a rotary knob for language selection. A custom 3D-printed shell holds it all together, and STL files are included in the repo.

Three models, zero cloud calls

What makes this project technically interesting is that the entire pipeline -- speech recognition, translation, and text-to-speech -- runs locally. There are three distinct AI components working together:

• Translation: LiteRT-LM, Google's open-source edge inference framework, runs the gemma4-e2b model. This is Gemma 4's smallest variant, a 2-billion effective parameter model that uses a mixed 2-bit/4-bit/8-bit quantization scheme to fit in under 1.5GB of RAM.
• Speech recognition (ASR): Moonshine, an open-source ASR model from Useful Sensors, handles transcription. It's purpose-built for edge hardware and benchmarks at up to 5x faster than Whisper Tiny with no increase in word error rate.