If you've looked at Microsoft Translator for work, you've probably noticed it comes in two very different pieces: a phone app for personal translation, and Azure Translator, a cloud service developers wire into their own software. Neither is quite a translator your team can open on Monday morning and use on a document.
Lexibird is a single app you can start using right away. You choose the AI model behind each translation, apply your own glossaries, and translate documents, screenshots, and recordings from the web, a desktop app, or your browser, without setting up cloud resources first.
At a glance
| Lexibird | Microsoft Translator | |
|---|---|---|
| Translation engine | Your choice of Claude, GPT, or Gemini models, or Auto, picked in the app | Neural machine translation, with LLM options through Azure APIs |
| Text translation | 200+ languages | 100+ languages and dialects in Azure |
| Documents | Upload PowerPoint, Word, Excel, or PDF, layout preserved | Azure Document Translation API with Blob Storage |
| Glossaries | Built into the app and shared by your team | Glossaries in Azure Document Translation, Custom Translator |
| Screenshots and images | OCR, plus screen-region capture on desktop | Camera translation in the mobile app |
| Recordings | Transcribe audio files, then translate | Through Azure Speech services |
| Desktop app | macOS and Windows | Mobile-focused app |
| Team access | Shared workspaces with admin and member roles | Azure resource management |
What is Lexibird?
Lexibird is an AI translator you sign into, not a service you deploy. Anyone on a team, from sales to support, can translate text in more than 200 languages, along with files, screenshots, and recordings, using shared glossaries and no developer time.
What is Microsoft Translator?
Microsoft Translator is Microsoft's translation service. For individuals, the Translator app offers text, camera, voice, conversation, and offline translation. For businesses and developers, Azure Translator provides REST APIs and SDKs for translating text and documents at scale, with support for custom models and large language model translation.
1. Ready to use, no integration project
Azure Translator is powerful, but it is infrastructure. Translating a batch of documents through its API means setting up an Azure resource, Blob Storage containers, authentication, and status polling.
With Lexibird, a sales manager who needs a pitch deck in Spanish just uploads it. Document translation takes PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and PDF files in batches, up to 40 MB each, and returns them with the layout intact. Files are deleted after 24 hours.
2. Pick the model from the translation screen
Azure lets developers choose between neural and LLM translation through its APIs. Lexibird puts that choice in front of the person translating. You can choose from leading AI models in the Claude, GPT, and Gemini families, or leave it on Auto, with premium models on paid plans.
That helps when context and tone carry the meaning. Translating "Just circling back on this, no rush" into German for a client, you can set the tone to formal and get a polite follow-up that uses "Sie" and reads like a real business email, not a word-for-word rendering of "circling back." If you'd like a different phrasing, try another model and compare.
3. Consistent terminology without training a model
Microsoft's Custom Translator lets organizations train their own translation systems from existing data, which takes engineering time and a large set of past translations. Lexibird glossaries take a simpler route: write down your preferred terms, and Lexibird uses them whenever someone on the team translates text in the browser or the desktop app.
An engineering firm can make sure "commissioning" always means bringing a plant into operation, not hiring an artist. The AI model treats the entry as a hint about meaning, so the term still reads naturally in context. If your documentation team already keeps a term list, it comes in as a spreadsheet or TMX file.
4. A desktop and browser workflow
Microsoft's Translator app is built mainly for phones, but most office work happens at a computer. Picture a project coordinator with a Polish chat message in one window and a scanned drawing full of German annotations in another. In Lexibird's desktop app for macOS and Windows, she copies the message and presses the shortcut to see it translated without leaving her chat. For the annotations, which can't be selected, she draws a box around them and Lexibird reads and translates the text.
The same app transcribes recordings like mp3 or wav files so you can translate the transcript, and includes a dictionary with alternative translations and transliteration. For pages on the web, there's a browser extension too.
5. Team controls without Azure administration
Lexibird teams get shared workspaces with invitations and admin and member roles. On the Business plan, you can add single sign-on with SAML or OIDC and zero data retention, all managed from the app rather than a cloud console.
Which one should you choose?
Microsoft Translator makes sense if you're building translation into your own software through Azure, or need offline translation and live conversations on a phone.
Choose Lexibird if you want:
- Translation working on day one, with no Azure resources, storage containers, or API keys
- Model choice on the translation screen, not in code
- Terminology control from a glossary instead of a custom-trained model
- Desktop and browser tools for people who work at a computer, not a phone
Try Lexibird and translate your next document in minutes.
