About

Why I built this.

I don't speak Chinese, and I work in China.

Some of my vendor meetings run entirely in Chinese. I'd sit through them with a translator, and afterwards someone would brief me on what had been decided. It worked, but it always arrived too late. By the time I understood what was said, the moment to ask about it had gone. I kept leaving rooms with questions I should have asked an hour earlier.

I looked at Plaud. It was expensive, and it wanted a subscription on top of that. The software alternatives were worse for my situation. Most of them work by sending a bot to join the call, so an outside service sits in on internal vendor meetings and keeps a copy of everything. I wasn't going to put that in front of my company, and I didn't want it either.

What I wanted was fairly simple. Transcribe the room live, so I can follow along while people are still talking. Translate it while it's happening. Write up the notes at the end. And do all of it on my own laptop, with nothing leaving the machine.

I couldn't find that, so I built it.

An engineer working in China