We’ve built a tool enabling everyone to understand and speak without any language barriers within just one app.
I am a native speaker in just one language. I also run IT businesses that require communication with people raised and living in countries other than mine. One more thing I’ve learnt about myself recently is that I don’t like all the compromises and limitations placed on me by the necessity to hire interpreters for online meetings. I no less dislike the fact that I can’t talk with ease to my friends, who speak in foreign languages, in audio and video chats, even simply during phone calls or messages. In such situations, I constantly have to rely on some intermediary translation tool.
So I thought: living in the globalized and digitalized world of today, why do we still have problems with speaking to other humans and understanding them even online?
Coming up with this idea was just the first step of a whole journey. The second step was to team up with my tech-brained friend, Vadim, to develop the solution. He suggested using the existing AI technologies to build a convenient and consistent app available for everyone that would enable people to talk to those who don’t speak their native language and understand them.
We named our web app YOUS because it unites people. Now individuals worldwide can easily switch between chatting, audio or video calls in any language pair, be it Japanese-Italian or German-Hindi. It works just as easily as it sounds: if we are talking voice translation, the tool recognizes speech, interprets it, and speaks in a synthesized voice in the interlocutor's language. Additionally, the whole conversation is duplicated in text chat format.
That is the story of how we had made the core of the language barrier problem disappear, but we went further. Another issue with interpreters is privacy and safety. When translation services are hired in the corporate world, data confidentiality is granted by legal tools, like NDAs. It doesn’t work in our personal lives though, because many people, myself included, are not comfortable with speaking on private and intimate matters with a third party involved.
On top of that, we really are at the point when we discuss online all kinds of things with people who don’t speak our native language. It means that I don’t want any second of my talk to be traceable. Ever. So there we were, ensuring data tracking was impossible in our app. Altogether with the AI-powered concept, it allows users not only to eliminate disclosing sensitive information to simultaneous interpreters but also to avoid any storage of their personal data.
It is a very practical tool to solve an ever-present problem that somehow hadn’t been tackled yet.
It is quite surprising that our current product is based on a body of present technologies merged in a hybrid system because it means that the solution has been right out there for some time. Actually, due to this availability of technologies, we achieved another key strength of our tool and made it affordable. Just like primary communication apps but with a completely new quality of breaking down language barriers.
What we see in it all is clearly a massive shift in the communications landscape. We all are used to assorted machine translation tools and features that really do help us understand each other no matter the language, but there is immense room to improve, quicken, and sharpen what we have now. Our web app is just the beginning, and we know that the capacity ahead is boundless. We also have an app that enables calling mobile and landline numbers with a built-in AI translator, and at the moment we are working on developing the know-how for automated recognition of gender and language by voice, as well as voice cloning for cross-language synthesis.
Envision a world where individuals, enterprises, institutions, and other communication parties can finally chat one-on-one independently of their language.
Thousands of doors would get opened immediately. It is exactly the world we’re heading to when introducing a new AI-powered communication tool to the market.
Whether you ever wished to understand and be understood immediately while chatting with your foreign friends or business partners online, or whether you never thought of this idea, the new era had arrived. We think the time has come to change international communications by the adoption of AI into the everyday processes of our lives.