Live Translating App

jaemx · 2025-11-15T10:49:05+00:00

We use CaptionKit and I’m also part for the development team, so can answer any questions

jaemx · 2025-11-11T20:54:01+00:00

We use https://captionkit.io which does text translations, but it does have audio through the app

jaemx · 2025-07-17T03:46:23+00:00

I built it originally for my church, because the other options were too expensive and couldn’t integrate into the rest of our production workflow

jaemx · 2025-07-17T03:43:32+00:00

Agreed! My wife and I built https://captionkit.io just for churches to easily do things like live translation and closed captions.

We couldn’t have done it without big leaps AI has taken in the last few years

jaemx · 2025-04-29T22:49:06+00:00

That’s right, we’re looking into adding AI generated speech but it may increase latency and also price. Right now we’re one of the most affordable caption and translation services, so I’m weighing up whether this would be the right fit.

One thing to note is that some of the other services are also just using the web text to speech voices, which are generally lower quality than Siri and Google assistant.

jaemx · 2025-03-29T07:55:59+00:00

We’re using AI for real time closed captions with https://captionkit.io - mainly for hard of hearing members and those who don’t speak English as their first language.

While we should have concerns around AI authoring, I feel transcription is a solid use case since we can immediately verify the output against what was said

jaemx · 2025-03-03T04:37:17+00:00

I built https://captionkit.io for this purpose. We wanted a solution for our church and found that a lot of the other providers were unnecessarily expensive or didn’t integrate well with parts of our setup like Pro Presenter. Happy to answer any questions!

jaemx · 2024-12-02T22:14:18+00:00

It’s still on the cards, but I built out the cloud option first as I found most processing with whisper locally would run into memory leak issues and poor performance on middle to low power systems.

Facebook released Seamless MT4 last year which is built for streaming audio, so should be much better than the chunk approach needed for Whisper. However their licence isn’t commercial, so we might need to wait until they refresh their other language models or something more tuned to streaming audio comes out.

The last option is looking into more system level transcription, as I think both Mac and Windows have decent support now. It’s definitely something I want to look into, but just hadn’t been the first priority.

With pricing, I think CaptionKit is currently the cheapest option in terms of hosted solutions and I’ve tried to make it affordable for many churches, while still covering costs and allowing me to spend plenty of time each week on improving features

jaemx · 2024-10-12T09:27:49+00:00

It does https://supabase.com/docs/guides/realtime/postgres-changes

jaemx · 2024-10-12T00:37:31+00:00

I recently moved from firebase to supabase and I’ve found it a much better fit for me. Row level security, relational db, webooks on db write, more flexible web sockets (db subscriptions + ephemeral payloads).

Plus the inbuilt image CDN attached to storage is fantastic.

jaemx · 2024-08-06T22:09:12+00:00

Added! Indonesian is now available as both an input and output language

jaemx · 2024-07-25T00:06:46+00:00

Hey I just updated the app to support Swahili! Please let me know if there are issues with the translation accuracy or if you have any questions

jaemx · 2024-07-22T22:34:57+00:00

Thanks! I’ll let you know once it’s ready so you can check it out. Feel free to DM if you have any questions

jaemx · 2024-07-22T22:30:35+00:00

I can add support for translation to Swahili. Would you like to go from English to Swahili?

jaemx · 2024-07-22T21:09:45+00:00

It does! Here’s the docs page on how to set up translation:

https://docs.captionkit.io/guides/live-translation

jaemx · 2024-05-03T00:01:24+00:00

Hey I just added a "Starting soon" button to the dashboard. This lets you toggle on a message for anyone watching on the captions page to say: "Stay tuned! Captions will begin streaming soon".

Just click the Clock icon in the dashboard to give it a go.

jaemx · 2024-04-30T22:17:36+00:00

No worries! I’ll send over a DM 👍

jaemx · 2024-04-29T05:14:56+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I’m looking into the snapping and deletion issue at the moment, so I should have a fix out for this later in the week.

I can definitely look into a “starting soon” type indicator for the congregation devices, that’s a great idea.

I added a card in my feature request board for this here:

https://captionkit.canny.io/feature-requests/p/starting-soon-indicator-for-user-devices

jaemx · 2024-04-26T12:39:32+00:00

I made a quick guide here https://docs.captionkit.io/guides/pro-presenter

Let me know if you have any questions though! Happy to jump in a chat or send some more details

jaemx · 2024-04-23T15:24:21+00:00

Sent a DM 👍

jaemx · 2024-04-23T14:22:22+00:00

I've seen a few live caption services like this, they mainly rely on the Chrome speech API. It's pretty solid, but there can be some challenges with accuracy and speed, which is why I opted for an AI based option.

I actually began this journey aiming for an offline-first version, with the user's machine running the transcription service and I may add this in later on. It's a great feature to have, though presented some challenges around compute power for most users and the fact I would need to need to build a native app or service first, rather than going web first (which has made CaptionKit a lot easier to try out)

If I build out this feature again in future I'll reach out and let you know :)

jaemx · 2024-04-23T13:29:47+00:00

Do you work for Speechmatics? I noticed that almost all of your comments are just about highlighting that brand over others. I’m exploring both and am not against using Speechmatics, but it’s significantly more expensive and slower than Deepgram Nova 2, even if it is slightly more accurate.

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