Hey HN! I'm Christian, and my co-founder Keyu and I are building Pinch (https://startpinch.com), a virtual conferencing platform with translation that mimics your voice and synchronizes your lips in real-time to make you sound and appear as a native speaker in over 15 languages.

Here's a demo: https://youtu.be/Cu7KlbZ3gjw, but you can also try it for free on our website.

Over the last three years, Keyu and I were working in a company where we had to lead engineering and research teams across the U.S., China, India, and Europe. We felt the language barrier actively limiting our team's potential in terms of collaboration + productivity. The existing tools we tried operated in low-bandwidth mediums (mostly text), which 1) means they are slower because they need to convert audio to text before translation, and 2) lose all information of how something was said.

At that point we knew there had to be a better way to connect across different languages and cultures, so we started building Pinch. Shortly after, we found out how challenging translation truly was. Balancing latency/accuracy for chunk-based audio translation, capturing inflection and tonality per statement, handling culturally specific phrasing, and making a seamless meeting experience are all unsolved problems we're taking on.

So far, we've seen some really interesting use-cases (many we hadn't considered!), from personal connections like a first conversation with foreign in-laws, to more business-oriented usage in sales and meeting foreign clients.

After a long experience building conversation AI video/audio, we're incredibly excited to see what these same technologies can unlock for human<>human communication.

You can try a demo or create a meeting for free: https://startpinch.com

All feedback is appreciated, and we'd love to know how we're doing on the overall meeting UX and translation accuracy for your language. Thanks all!

user:	zachanderson
created:	January 26, 2025
karma:	-11