We have known each other for many years, worked together for some time before, have many common interests and can communicate openly, this is not the first project we discussed, because many ideas we will be disproved in the process of discussion. But this project was proven to be a worthwhile market by our repeated arguments about the market, users, and costs, so we made a testable product after work and verified it in the real world.
During a meeting with a Japanese customer, the translator in the middle of the meeting asked me what kind of product I was making, and I couldn't find it on the Internet. I replied that this is what I did, but it has not yet been released to the market, and we use it to solve our own problems first. She said, that on-line must tell her, their company many project managers will docking Japanese customers, very much in need of such products. This is also to give us a validation of the needs of the affirmation, means that the market has not yet been well satisfied.
At one time, we were very worried about the cost, because the same type of products are either like Google Translate, which is free but with high latency, and there is no way to achieve the expected experience. Or like Felo, Cuckoo, Talo, they are generally priced at $299/month or even $100, which is a great obstacle for real-time two-way translation products to go to the market. At the same time, seeing the overseas similar products Pinch, Cuckoo in the last two months have entered the YC, also gives us more confidence.
But thanks to the release of the latest speech grand model, and the improvements we made to it, we were able to do extremely cheap dual-channel translations, which allowed us to have very competitive equivalencies. After combining the Big Model's ability to understand industry jargon, I later had another meeting with a Japanese client, and it has been able to basically replace the work of translators, and we felt it was worth investing more effort to build: a product that enables cross-language, no-latency conversations. We felt that it was worth investing more effort to build a product that could enable latency-free conversations across languages, that could be used in online meetings, offline business meetings, and travel scenarios, that could be used across platforms (not like the upcoming iOS19 with Airpods), that had high accuracy and low latency, and that was priced at an acceptable price point for a broad and fast-growing market.
