Hey if you're reading this, I appreciate you for taking the time. I built Cosmo after a 2-month solo trip through Central Asia, where I often had to communicate in languages I didn’t speak, like Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Russian. Most translation apps worked fine for quick phrases, but they broke down in real conversations: longer sentences got messy and inaccurate, and constantly passing the phone back and forth made everything feel unnatural for sustained conversations. I also found that prompting general-purpose voice models to act as translators can work surprisingly well at times, but they’re often unreliable in real-world conversations. In noisy environments they can glitch, drift, or lose consistency, which makes them hard to trust when you just want a conversation to flow. To solve that, I first built a scrappy web app for myself. It ended up being surprisingly useful, especially while I was volunteering and living with a local Kyrgyz family who didn’t speak English. I could place my phone on the dinner table and use it to talk with the grandparents in the family, even though we couldn’t speak each other’s languages at all. I also used it with a local taxi driver who needed both hands on the wheel, where passing a phone back and forth simply wasn’t practical. In both cases, having a more hands-free translation flow made the conversation feel much more natural. That experience made me want to turn it into a proper mobile app, which became Cosmo. With Cosmo, my hope is to help people connect more freely across languages and not let language barriers block conversations, relationships, or opportunities. Of course, it’s always ideal to learn the local language, but until then, an accurate and reliable translation tool can be a powerful bridge.

Cosmo Translator

Talk to anyone naturally without the language barriers

Talk to anyone naturally without the language barriers