Keeping up with Thai friend groups

What changes

One person adds Pood Thai to the group. From then on every message gets a translation posted underneath it, and anything you write in English shows up in Thai for everyone else.

The part that matters is the last two lines. Without the bot, your options were to stay quiet or to make everyone switch to English for you. Neither of those is a group you stay in for long.

It stays readable

• ·Translations post as replies quoting the original message, so in a group where three people are typing you can always tell what is being translated.
• ·No phonetic spellings in groups. Those only appear when you DM the bot, precisely so a group chat does not get a second line under every message.
• ·Names stay as names. Proper nouns are left alone rather than getting translated into something strange halfway through.

The free limit in a group

The 20 a day is counted per person, not per chat, so a group of four has around 80 free translations a day between them before anyone hits anything. When you do run out, Pood Thai messages you privately rather than posting in the group.

Slang is the hard part, and the point

Friend groups are where Thai is least like a textbook: shortened spellings, English written in Thai script, particles doing most of the emotional work, and slang that turns over every couple of years. Pood Thai is built for that register rather than for formal text, which is the difference between a translation that tells you what was said and one that tells you whether people are actually going.

If you want to reply in Thai yourself rather than through the bot, keep a DM open with it and check the phrasing and pronunciation there first: how to say something in Thai.