Waverly Labs launches a translation app called Forum with support for 20 languages

Waverly Labs, the company behind wearables focused on translation, has launched an app called Forum that helps users translate and transcribe audio in real time. The company says the solution is useful for lecturers, auditoriums and theaters. What’s more, it is also compatible with video calling apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

Forum is available on iOS and accessible through a browser. The app’s Android version will launch by the end of this quarter. It supports 20 languages and 42 dialects, including Arabic, Dutch, English, Hindi, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Users can join an existing session or create one and share a QR code with others.

Users have the option to switch to a new language in the middle of the session to get text and audio translation. There is also a profanity filter to block words that users don’t want to see in a chat. Forum also has hold-to-talk and pause-to-translate modes for a conversation that doesn’t need instantaneous conversation.

The app is free to use when you join a session, but it limits you to host a five-person session with 40 minutes of interpretation every month. Users of the free tier can download unlimited transcripts. The paid plan, which runs $7.99 a month, raises the time limit and lets you add custom vocabulary to improve the translation.

Organizations, including Japanese apparel company Uniqlo and French luxury house Chanel, are already using Forum for their in-person and online meetings for multinational teams. It’s also being utilized by the Broadway show “The Perfect Crime” to provide real-time translation for international visitors.

“Forum leverages our core translation technology that uses the latest speech recognition and machine translations in a compelling and easy-to-use app without the need for any hardware or equipment,” the company’s founder and CEO Andrew Ochoa said in a statement.

Waverly Labs unveiled a new double-sided touchscreen for retail kiosks last year to make it easy for multilingual customers and operators to chat with each other.

Waverly Labs launches a translation app called Forum with support for 20 languages by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch