New languages coming soon to Thoth

TL;DR: Thoth, the experimental AI curation bot, has been updated so that it can now (sort-of) produce its reports in English, German, or Spanish. I will be testing that feature from the @thoth.test account during the next couple of weeks.

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Background: What is Thoth?

Thoth was described last June in the post, Here is a complete framework for a Generation-5 voting service..

It was first conceived to be a delegation bot that didn't require its delegators to spam the blockchain with daily posting, but quickly evolved to provide even more features. The code is open source, so anyone can submit enhancements and run their own copy. It even works with the free LLM APIs from arliai or Gemini.

Briefly, here's an overview of Thoth's history.

1. It was conceived as a way that delegators can piggy-back on attractive content from Steem's authors, instead of needing to post a daily spam post in order to generate rewards from their delegation.
2. A side benefit of this is that authors can also receive supplemental rewards from their posts (see data dignity).
3. An unexpected feature quickly became available so that posts can even generate rewards for their authors long after the payout window has ended.
4. As the project progressed, another unexpected feature was noticed. Namely, Thoth summarizes posts from multiple source languages into a single curation post in English. This makes non-English posts easily accessible to readers who only understand English.
   • The reader can read a post summary in their native language, and only then decide whether to click through and go through the effort of translation.
   • For me, this feature has turned out to be immensely useful. I can't begin to guess how many non-English articles I have benefited from that I never would have read without having them turn up in Thoth's curation posts.
   • In fact, it's so useful that I wanted to offer the capability to readers who prefer other languages.
5. Therefore, I recently implemented the capability for Thoth to produce its curation reports in German and Spanish.

Let me be clear about what Thoth is now accomplishing (via the @thoth.test account)

1. It provides me with curation rewards that are comparable to my autovoter's return rate.
2. It provides delegators with return rates that are competitive with other delegation bots, and with no need for the delegator to make a daily post ( #passive-rewards ).
3. It provides authors with lifetime payouts for posts that meet its (customizable) curation standards ( #lifetime-rewards ).
4. It is burning 25% of every post's author rewards.
5. It brings more readers to an author's posts, even readers that would normally not read posts in the source language.

Between rewards, burning, and visibility, I believe that Thoth offers benefits to every single type of Steem's stakeholders.

If I had any marketing skills at all, this would be an amazing product!

The main remaining challenge is that it is not clear whether/how it scales. This might be good, though, because if it doesn't scale, then that would encourage decentralization. (I suspect that it does scale, but I don't have enough stake to demonstrate that.)

Last week's updates

Anyway, as I said, the English-language summary of multi-language posts turned out to be so useful to me that I wanted to offer the capability to people who prefer other languages. So, last weekend, I developed the ability for Thoth to produce its reports in German or in Spanish. You can see examples:

Language	Post
German	Kuratiert von Thoth - 2026-02-03 02:00Z
Spanish	Curado por Thoth - 2026-02-04 00:54Z

This was accomplished through two mechanisms:

1. The LLM prompt was simply changed to direct the AI to produce its report in the new languages; and
2. Hard-coded text in Thoth's posts was translated via dictionary using LLM translation. The translations are here.

So now, Thoth is multi-lingual, and the output language can be changed by simply changing an entry in a config file.

However, I don't read Spanish or German very well, so it's probably a safe bet that some of the LLM translations are either wrong or awkward. I have read the posts with my browser translation turned on, but that doesn't tell me much about the original phrasing.

What's next?

If all goes as expected, the @thoth.test account will be producing its reports in German from February 7 through February 13 and then in Spanish from February 14 through February 20 (then back to English).

During this test period, I invite German and Spanish language speakers to review the posts and tell me if there are any language issues that need to be addressed.

Conclusion

I hope you'll agree with me that Thoth's ability to produce single-language summaries of multi-language posts can be extremely useful to readers. It's always a nice thing when an unintended side-effect turns out to be useful, instead of harmful.

Please keep your eye on the @thoth.test account for the next couple weeks, and let me know what is needed to improve Thoth's language mastery.