For the past few months, I've been working on a project that translates online meetings in real time.
At first, I thought the problem would mostly be about choosing the right speech recognition model and finding a good translation API. It turned out those were the easy parts.
The real challenge was making everything feel instant.
People don't wait for subtitles. If the translation appears two or three seconds after someone finishes speaking, the conversation has already moved on. Technically it works, but from a user's perspective, it feels broken.
That completely changed how I approached the project.
