toby

Toby is revolutionizing the way we communicate across languages with its innovative live speech translation desktop app. Developed by a passionate multicultural team based in San Francisco, Toby aims to eliminate language barriers in professional settings, enabling seamless communication on any video call platform like Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet. The product taps into the impressive advancements in speech translation technology to offer real-time language translation, making it accessible to a global audience.

The team behind Toby, driven by an appreciation for diverse cultures and languages, built the app with the vision of fostering a truly global workplace. They recognized that language can significantly limit career potential and saw the immense potential of breaking down these barriers to unlock opportunities across borders. Toby addresses this by allowing users to speak in seven of the most spoken languages globally—including English, Chinese, and Spanish—with just over a two-second delay, mimicking the experience of simultaneous interpretation.

At its core, Toby functions as a virtual microphone and speaker, facilitating bidirectional audio translation so that only one participant needs the app for a multilingual conversation. This user-centric design includes features like personalized glossaries for industry-specific jargon and spoken and heard transcripts to prevent any loss in translation. Moreover, privacy is a top priority, with all processes running locally on the user's device to ensure data security.

Targeting professionals, global teams, and multinational organizations, Toby is a game-changer for industries where communication across languages is crucial. With its pioneering technology, Toby is positioning itself as an essential tool in the march toward a globally connected and linguistically inclusive future.

Toby is a cutting-edge desktop application designed to provide live speech translation during video calls, bridging language barriers and facilitating multilingual communication. Its features highlight its ease of use, comprehensive language support, and privacy-focused design.

Core Functionalities

Toby functions as a virtual microphone and speaker, seamlessly integrating with popular video call platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. This allows users to speak and understand various languages in real-time during video calls. Notably, the translation process involves only a minimal delay of just over two seconds, akin to the efficiency of a simultaneous interpreter. This ensures conversations remain fluid and natural, even across different languages.

Bidirectional Audio Translation

One of Toby's standout features is its bidirectional audio translation capability, enabling a truly multilingual conversation with minimal setup. In practice, this means only one participant in a conversation needs to have Toby installed to engage in a fully translated dialogue. This feature significantly lowers the barrier for entry, allowing users across various fields and backgrounds to communicate effectively without needing every participant to have the application.

Personalization and Customization

Toby offers personalized glossaries that are tailored to specific industries or individual user needs, enabling accurate translation of specialized terminology and jargon. These glossaries can be customized to suit different professional contexts, ensuring that even nuanced or complex phrases are translated correctly.

Privacy and Security

Ensuring user privacy and data security, Toby does not store any call recordings or audio data from the user's computer. This commitment to privacy is further reinforced by the fact that all translation processes run locally on the user's device, minimizing concerns about data leaks or unauthorized access to call content.

Supported Languages

Initially supporting seven of the most widely spoken languages—English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese—Toby is designed to cater to a broad audience. The app's language support is rapidly expanding, promising a future of even greater multilingual inclusivity, ideal for global teams and international business engagements.