Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me. But neighborhood meetings were a completely different level.

People speak fast. There's local dialect. Someone references a flood from 1987, a land boundary dispute from 1994, and three people I've never met but everyone else knows. I would walk out feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.

So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.

Live Kaiwa listens to Japanese speech and, in real time, shows:

* Japanese transcription * English translation * a running summary of what's being discussed * suggested responses you can say back

The idea is to help you stay oriented in complex conversations.

You can try it here: https://livekaiwa.com

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How it works

When you start a session, the browser microphone captures the conversation and streams audio.

The pipeline looks roughly like this:

1. Audio streaming - Browser microphone → WebRTC → server

2. Speech to text - Kotoba Whisper runs a fast first pass transcription.

3. Multi-pass correction - Buffered audio is re-transcribed with higher accuracy and replaces earlier text.

4. LLM processing - Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates: English translations, summary bullets, and suggested replies (with TTS)

5. Live UI updates - Everything streams back to the browser in (mostly) real time.

Session data stays in the browser, nothing is stored server-side.

Why I built it, in short: even if you speak Japanese reasonably well, fast, multi-person discussions can become overwhelming. Seeing the conversation transcribed and summarized helps.