I built this to talk to her mom.

I moved to Bangkok from New York City in January 2026. I'd traveled a decent amount before that, so I figured I'd be fine. I wasn't. The language thing hit me on basically day one and it never really let up. Ordering food, talking to a driver, trying to say something real to someone who had been kind to me. There was always this wall.

I did what everyone does and leaned on Google Translate. You probably know exactly how that goes. You type something out, hold the phone up, wait, watch them read it, watch them half get it, and the whole time the actual moment is just draining away. The words come out right and you somehow still feel like strangers. After a while I started dreading pulling it out at all.

Around that time I met a Thai girl who is now my girlfriend. Her mom doesn't speak any English, and the first few times I met her I'm standing in the kitchen with my phone up like an idiot, this little screen between us. I hated it.

I didn't want to translate at her. I wanted to actually talk to her.

So I started building something for myself. Nothing fancy at first. I just wanted to say something out loud and have her hear it, in her language, without her needing to do anything on her end.

A bit later I went to China for the first time, and honestly it was harder there. I tried Apple's Live Translation on the AirPods, which is a genuinely cool idea, and it still left me stuck more often than not. Google Translate was the same clunky thing it has always been. None of it felt like it was made by someone who had actually been in the situation, a little sweaty, really trying to be understood by a person who was being patient with me.

So I kept using my own version, and I kept noticing things. The moments where you cannot afford to get it wrong, an allergy, a price, someone's name. The way tone matters as much as the words, especially in Thai, where being a touch too blunt lands wrong even when you are technically correct. I cared about how it felt to use, not just whether it worked, because I was the one using it every single day. I tested everything with my girlfriend, we started adding more languages, and at some point it turned into the thing I wish someone had handed me on my first day in Bangkok.

I'll be honest about what it is. It's not a translation app, it's an interpreter. It gives you the moment, not just the words. Building software is what I've always done, but it was always for a market, for someone else's problem. This is the first thing I've made because I couldn't do without it myself. The people I wanted to talk to deserved more than a phone turned around in their face.

If you have ever felt that gap, the one between getting the words right and actually being understood, I think you'll get it.