Company

About Gaavala

A small independent team in Istanbul, building the meeting translator we wanted to use.

Our Story

Gaavala was born out of frustration. We experienced firsthand, in meeting after meeting, how much productive time is lost when participants don't share a common language. Critical decisions get delayed. Ideas get lost in translation. People disengage because they simply cannot follow what's being said.

Enterprise solutions for real-time meeting translation existed — but they required lengthy procurement processes, five-figure annual contracts, and deep IT integrations that were out of reach for most teams. We believed this problem deserved a better answer.

So we built one. Gaavala is a small, independent team based in Turkey with a straightforward goal: make real-time meeting translation accessible to everyone, not just enterprises with big budgets.

What We Built

Gaavala is a Chrome extension for real-time meeting translation. Once installed from the Chrome Web Store, it adds live captions, instant translation, and AI voice translation (Speak Mode) to meetings running in Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, or Webex. 60 languages are supported.

Install once from the Chrome Web Store, pin the Gaavala icon, and open the side panel in a supported meeting tab. Setup time depends on sign-in and browser permissions. There is no separate account to create on the website — authentication happens inside the extension.

How It Works

Gaavala uses Chrome's tabCapture API from the extension's offscreen document to access meeting audio directly from the browser tab. That audio streams over an encrypted WebSocket (TLS 1.2+) directly to Soniox, our speech-to-text partner, and the returned tokens appear as live captions in the Gaavala side panel and in a floating overlay on the meeting.

On Pro, Speak Mode goes one step further: the translated caption is synthesized into speech and injected back into the meeting in the single target language you select, powered by Soniox:

  • Soniox studio voices (Pro default): 68 managed studio voices that speak all 60 supported languages — no API key to manage, ready out of the box — or a clone of your own voice from a two-minute sample.

What Makes Gaavala Different

Privacy-First Architecture

Meeting audio flows directly from your browser to Soniox over an encrypted WebSocket. Gaavala's backend is not in the audio path. We do not record, store, or use meeting audio for model training. Our backend handles authentication, subscription status and usage minutes, never meeting audio — AI summaries are generated entirely on-device by Chrome's built-in AI, so transcripts never reach our servers either.

This architecture matters for legal consultations, medical discussions, financial meetings, and any conversation where routing meeting audio through a translation vendor's own servers is not acceptable. We built Gaavala so that meeting audio goes straight to the company doing the speech recognition, Soniox, which we contract, and never through our own servers.

A Real Free Trial, Not a Disguised Paywall

The free tier is 5 minutes of transcription, one-time, never resets. It is designed to let you try Gaavala against a real meeting segment once and decide whether it fits your workflow. It is not a 7-day trial, not a daily refill — once you use the 5 minutes, ongoing use requires the Pro subscription. No credit card is required to start.

Platform Coverage

Full Speak Mode support and live captions on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Cisco Webex — the four platforms most enterprise meetings run on. Join each meeting from its web client in a Chrome tab; desktop apps are not supported.

No Vendor Lock-In

Gaavala is self-service. Install from the Chrome Web Store, sign in with Google or Microsoft, pick a plan if you need Pro, and start translating. Cancel anytime. No sales calls, no annual commitments.

Our Technology

Gaavala is built with modern web technologies designed for performance and reliability:

  • Extension: Chrome Manifest V3 (tabCapture, offscreen, sidePanel, identity)
  • Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Vite, CRXJS
  • Backend: Node.js, Express, Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL (Neon)
  • Speech Recognition: Soniox Web SDK (managed key, real-time streaming)
  • Text-to-Speech (Speak Mode): Soniox studio voices (managed, Pro default) and personal voice clones
  • Hosting: Vercel (serverless functions + edge CDN)
  • Authentication: OAuth 2.0 (Google + Microsoft)
  • Payments: our payment partner (Merchant of Record)

Our Mission

Language should not be a barrier to collaboration. Whether you're a Turkish engineer on a call with a Japanese client, a French researcher joining an English-language conference, or a multilingual team trying to work more inclusively — Gaavala is here to help everyone follow along, participate fully, and contribute their best work.

We are committed to building AI-powered communication tools that are private, honest about their limitations, and priced fairly.

Our Values

  • Privacy by design: We process as little data as possible, and we are transparent about what we do process.
  • Honest AI: We surface transcription confidence and remind users that AI output is imperfect. We don't oversell accuracy.
  • Accessibility over exclusivity: Real utility for real people, not just enterprise feature lists.
  • Small and focused: We'd rather do one thing well than ship a bloated product nobody uses.

Gaavala by the Numbers

  • 60 languages supported for transcription and translation
  • 15 UI languages — English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Dutch, Polish
  • 4 host platforms with full Speak Mode — Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco Webex
  • One extension for captions and translated speech on supported meeting tabs
  • $0 to start — 5-minute lifetime free trial, no credit card required

Location

Gaavala is built and operated by a small, independent team based in Istanbul, Turkey. We serve users globally and our infrastructure is distributed across Vercel's edge network for low-latency access worldwide.

Get in Touch

We'd love to hear from you — feedback, bug reports, feature ideas, or just to say hello.