TranslateMyCall.com

Hi folks, Alex here! I'm the co-creator of TranslateMyCall.com. This started as a hackathon-style project with a friend but turned into a larger project. We set out looking to let people talk to each other over the phone when they don't speak the same language. You can do this in-person with Google Translate, over VoIP with Skype, but over the phone the only option is to hire a human interpreter for $1-$4/hr — and you might not be able to get one for the language pair you want. We thought this was going to be a simple problem to solve, but it turned out working with telephony is super hard. For one, Twilio is really annoying to integrate with. Harder yet, phone audio is quite low quality (8 KHz/8-bit samples), which makes getting transcription (speech-to-text) working with high quality and low latency really hard. We banged our heads against that for quite a while before getting it to an acceptable level of quality/latency. We finally finished the working version today and are releasing it as a public alpha that'll be free for the foreseeable future. Please let us know any questions, comments, or feedback you have, and we'd appreciate it if you share this with anyone who would find it useful!