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

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

#22

Post by christiansafka »

alloysmila wrote: post #10

Just this morning I told myself I should build something like this. I work in global supply chain and the language barriers are an absolute mess.

It's hard, don't do it :D We have a few supply chain companies trying us out though! Would love to hear more about your experience.

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

#23

Post by christiansafka »

elixirnogood wrote: post #13
christiansafka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! LiveKit is great - and we are using livekit agents but had to override a few low-level library components for our use case.

Do you have any concerns around scaling? I like LikeKit stack, but if not mistaken their agent architecture is based on multiprocessing (one os process per 'session'/'conversation') which doesn't sound very scalable. Btw, great demo, this is a cool technical problem to solve. I've spend a couple of months in this space (using a similar stack) and know for a fact that's not easy.

Thanks, there are certainly a lot of fun and challenging problems to take on in the space. On scaling, the agent architecture isn't limited to one machine, so you can also autoscale your machines. It's essentially python's Celery if you've tried that. It gets more tricky when you require GPUs though!

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

#26

Post by debarshri »

brap wrote: post #17

Assuming the tech is solid, I think that if you had developed this as a browser extension to work on top of Meet/Teams/etc, not only would your dev time have been much shorter and adoption much faster, but Google/Microsoft/etc would have probably bought you out in a blink of an eye.

I am not sure if the dev time would be shorter because teams and meet have its own nuances as well as you would be limited to what you could be by the tool itself. Also, i dont think you would go into every call with this plugin on.

This is very valuation where communication barrier is high and has specialized usecases in industries like supply chain, outsourcing.

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

#27

Post by christiansafka »

lolpanda wrote: post #25

Great idea! The demo looks impressive. What are your thoughts on real-time translated captioning compared to AI voice? I guess it's still difficult to mimic nonverbal elements like laughter and pauses.

Fantastic question. Our opinion on this is that the higher-bandwidth we can make the communication, the more useful it will be. The reason we've moved from IRC->VoIP->Video is because of the efficiency of information transfer and additionally the empathic element of face-to-face conversation.

From the technical side, speech to speech models have more potential for accuracy (no explicit ASR, no audio->text information loss). We have a few options on mimic'ing nonverbal elements - we could decide when to naturally mix in the original audio, or train our end to end model to handle those nonverbal audio chunks. We'll be trying both but likely the first option on the sooner side!

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

#28

Post by AznHisoka »

christiansafka wrote: post #7
tpae wrote: 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.

Would companies switch their video conferencing solution to yours, or do you envision them using both side by side?
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