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Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

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Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

#1
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 humanhuman 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!

Re: Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

#3
I really like the concept, but I don't understand why you guys are building an entire video conferencing platform. That sounds like years of work building the network and millions of VC funds. It could be a standalone app that exports video to existing conferencing services. I would pay good money for that.

Re: Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

#4

Hey just a heads up the demo on your site is broken (for me). English transcriptions are coming through fine but translations aren't being spoken, despite the output video stuttering for a moment at the time when it should.

We noticed that Swedish isn't currently working properly, but we weren't able to replicate this with any other languages. Please let us know if it's still having issues!

Re: Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

#5
post #3

I really like the concept, but I don't understand why you guys are building an entire video conferencing platform. That sounds like years of work building the network and millions of VC funds. It could be a standalone app that exports video to existing conferencing services. I would pay good money for that.

By export I assume you mean as a virtual webcam? I would definitely prefer that as a user to be able to use any videoconferencing app.

Re: Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

#7
post #3

I really like the concept, but I don't understand why you guys are building an entire video conferencing platform. That sounds like years of work building the network and millions of VC funds. It could be a standalone app that exports video to existing conferencing services. I would pay good money for that.

Thanks! We have a virtual camera on our roadmap as well, but by building the conferencing platform end to end we can optimize both latency and conversation UX to a much higher degree. We're also lucky to be building this now and not five years ago - there are some solid webrtc infra companies and open source projects to build on.
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