Ask HN: Talking to non-English speakers online?

[ginkoutest]

I have a lot of friends abroad I met while traveling, but lost fluency in those languages over the years. I built a piece of tech that is a barebones video chat app that can translate between different languages in real-time with a few seconds of latency. The translation renders as STT output on screen in the target language (with the option for TTS audio output as well).

Some friends mentioned that they might use something like this when reaching out to Chinese manufacturers who don't speak English as well. They run their own businesses (custom hardware and dropshipping) and need to talk with Chinese manufacturers to explain exactly what they need.

I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile making this a SaaS product or just keeping it to myself and my friends. Would anyone else here have a need for a real-time translation video chat app?

[yuppie_scum]

Google Meets has captions with translation already: https://support.google.com/meet/answer/10964115

Haven't used this feature yet so can't speak to accuracy/usability.

[ginkoutest]

Do you think most people looking for a solution like this are aware of Google Meet's feature?

[logicalmonster]

> Would anyone else here have a need for a real-time translation video chat app?

I have to question if this is an actual post, because asking if a real-time video translator that works well would be useful to other people seems bizarre.

The answer is yes, that's a great product, if it work well.

[ginkoutest]

For sure, but when you say "works well" what would that look like to you? There might be some sacrifices on the video-chat side (this app wouldn't compete with Zoom, for example, on video quality or latency), but the focus would be on audio, translation, and transcription quality.

From chatting with friends, it works well even for long sentences, but the latency can vary between 3 - 7 seconds. So I wanted to understand how much delay would be tolerated by most people who would be interested in using this.