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Introducing Speak Mode: AI Voice Translation That Speaks For You in Meetings

Gaavala’s Speak Mode translates what you say and plays a synthetic voice into a browser meeting in one selected target language. It requires Pro. Hold the Speak button for a short turn or tap for a hands-free window; this guide explains setup, voices and playback limits.

One button — tap it or hold it — A tap opens a 60-second hands-free window. Hold instead and you talk only while you hold. Tap again to stop early.

What Speak Mode Actually Does

Speak Mode is not a dubbing track layered on top of a transcript. It is a live, bidirectional voice pipeline that runs alongside the existing Gaavala transcription flow.

When you activate it during a meeting, the following happens inside your browser:

Your microphone audio is captured by the extension — separately from the tab audio Gaavala already captures for the incoming side.
That microphone audio streams directly to Soniox over a WebSocket for speech-to-text. This is the same direct-to-Soniox pattern the rest of Gaavala uses — your microphone audio never touches our backend.
As Soniox emits committed tokens in your source language, the extension batches them into short phrases and sends the text to Gaavala's translation step for the target language you configured.
Soniox synthesizes the translated text using your selected studio voice or personal voice clone.
That voice clip is sent into the call in place of your outgoing microphone track, so everyone hears the translated voice as if it were your own. There is no virtual microphone device to install and nothing to select in your meeting app's audio settings — and while the translated voice is playing, your real microphone is muted so the call never hears both at once.

One Button That Reads the Gesture

Real meetings are not all alike, so Speak Mode has to behave differently when you are firing back a one-line answer and when you are walking someone through a slide. Most tools solve that with a mode selector you have to set before you need it — which means the moment you need the other mode, you are in the wrong one.

Gaavala has no mode selector. There is one Speak button, and it reads how you press it.

Hold it

Hold the button and you are talking only while you hold. Let go and the pipeline closes cleanly. This is the walkie-talkie gesture, and it is the safe one: you never accidentally broadcast a side comment, a cough, or a moment of thinking-out-loud. It is the right instinct for a quick interjection, for high-stakes calls where precision beats flow, and for any room where your microphone might pick up voices you did not intend to translate.

Holding also works from the keyboard — press and keep Space held for about a third of a second and it behaves exactly like holding the button.

For short interventions and turn-taking, the push-to-talk workflow walks through when to hold, release and wait for the translated reply to finish.

Tap it

Tap the button instead and it opens a hands-free 60-second window. A ring counts the window down in minutes and seconds and turns amber for the last ten, so you always know how much of your turn is left without watching a clock. Speak naturally; Gaavala translates and voices each phrase as you go, and you never touch anything.

Two quick taps open a 30-second window instead — the honest length for a short prepared point. Tap once more while a window is running and it stops early; otherwise it ends by itself at zero.

Why this is one control and not two

The gesture you already make encodes the intent. Holding means "just this", a tap means "give me a stretch". Nothing has to be configured in advance, nothing is in the wrong mode when the moment arrives, and there is no hotkey to bind or forget. The safety property people liked about push-to-talk — nothing leaves the room unless you meant it — is still exactly true of holding.

The Voices: 68 Studio Presets and Your Own

Speak Mode gives you two ways to choose the voice the meeting hears, and either voice speaks all 60 languages Gaavala translates.

68 Soniox studio voices (Pro default)

Soniox studio voices are the default on Pro and the one most people never need to change: 68 multilingual presets that speak all 60 languages Gaavala translates, cross-lingually, with a managed key — there is nothing to set up. Synthesis goes browser-direct to Soniox using the same short-lived-key pattern as captions, so the translated text never passes through Gaavala's backend.

Your own voice (native clone)

Read a two-minute script once, in the side panel, and Gaavala builds a personal voice clone — Soniox-powered — that speaks the same 60 languages a studio voice would, in your own timbre instead of a preset. The reference sample is stored encrypted, and you can delete it at any time from the same settings screen; your meeting audio itself is never stored, on this feature or anywhere else in Gaavala.

A studio voice needs no personal reference recording. A clone uses your own sample to approximate your voice; similarity and pronunciation can vary by language and phrase.

For a recurring client call, your own voice clone can give Speak Mode a familiar voice; the recording and deletion steps are explained there.

How It Compares to What Else Is Out There

Native spoken translation is available in Teams Interpreter, Google Meet Speech Translation and Zoom Voice Translator, each with its own licensing, client and language conditions. Gaavala’s distinction is a single browser workflow across Teams, Zoom, Meet and Webex, with 68 Soniox studio voices or your own clone on Pro. Choose using the exact language pair and meeting setup; this article does not claim that Gaavala is the only voice-translation option.

Who Speak Mode Is For

Speak Mode is a Pro feature and it is priced for individual professionals, not enterprise deployments. The people who get the most out of it are:

International consultants running project calls with clients whose English is limited and who would rather hear you in their own language than struggle through yours.
Multilingual team leads joining standups with offshore engineering teams, where half the team thinks in one language and half thinks in another.
Sales reps selling into foreign markets where a fluent-sounding voice in the customer's language changes how the call feels and how the quote lands.
Field operations people bridging between an offshore site and HQ, where the stakes of a misunderstanding are operational, not just social.

If your meetings are fully bilingual in a single pair and everyone can keep up, you probably do not need Speak Mode. If there is a recurring moment where you or someone on the other side falls silent because the language gap is one-way, this is the feature that fixes that moment.

To speak without using the microphone, see the typed-reply accessibility workflow.

Privacy: What Changes and What Does Not

Gaavala's core privacy architecture does not change when you enable Speak Mode. Incoming meeting audio still streams directly from your browser to Soniox over a WebSocket that never touches our backend. Your microphone audio for Speak Mode follows the same direct-to-Soniox pattern — we never see it.

The TTS step follows the same pattern for both voice options. Soniox studio voices send the translated text browser-direct to Soniox, authenticated with the same short-lived temporary keys captions use — Gaavala's backend never sees the text or the audio. Your own cloned voice synthesizes the same way, with one deliberate, narrow exception upstream of it: the two-minute reference sample you record to build the clone is stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM) on Gaavala's servers, used only to build and maintain your voice, and deletable on request at any time. Nothing else about Speak Mode's audio — not your microphone input, not the meeting audio, not the synthesized output — is ever stored.

Gaavala's backend remains outside the audio path for both voice options. If you want to verify this, the same network inspection trick from our privacy post still works: open the extension's background page DevTools, filter the Network tab, and you will see a direct connection to Soniox — and no microphone or meeting audio traffic to gaavala.com.

How to Enable It

Speak Mode is a Pro-only feature. Gaavala's free trial (one-time 5 minutes, no credit card, never resets) does not include Speak Mode, so the setup flow goes roughly like this:

Install Gaavala from the Chrome Web Store free and sign in.
Upgrade to Pro from the side panel — $19.99/month. Pro has no trial of its own, so you subscribe directly when you need Speak Mode.
Open the side panel settings and find the Speak Mode section.
Choose a studio voice, or create your own voice and wait until its status is Ready. Check the selected voice before speaking.
Configure the target language for the meeting. There is no capture mode to pick — the Speak button reads your gesture, so nothing has to be decided in advance.

Then join a meeting. Hold the Speak button when you want to say one thing, or tap it for a hands-free window when you have a stretch to deliver.

Before using outgoing speech, follow the browser setup for Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or Webex. Check the meeting’s access rules and test with another participant; a desktop meeting app is a different audio path.

Real-World Usage Tips

A few practical notes from building and dogfooding this:

Warm up by holding. The first time you hear your synthesized voice play into a meeting, it will feel strange. Hold the button for your first few calls before you start tapping for hands-free windows. Your sense of when to pause, how loud to speak, and how the translated voice lands on the other side all calibrate quickly — but only if you are in control of each burst.
Clone your own voice only. The side panel's recording flow only builds a clone from a sample you record of yourself — there is no path to cloning someone else's voice through Speak Mode, and the in-app consent step reflects that.
Disclose if it matters. If your meeting has compliance implications — legal, medical, regulated sales — tell the other side that a real-time voice translation layer is in the call. It is the same etiquette as disclosing a transcription tool.
Keep the native audio on. Gaavala still pipes the original meeting audio to your speakers. You should still be listening to and reading the incoming side. Speak Mode is the outgoing half, not a replacement for understanding what is being said to you.

FAQ

Does the meeting know I am using it? Not directly. The synthesized voice arrives on the other side through the same microphone channel you would use yourself, so there is no banner or metadata. The other side hears a very fluent voice and may notice small pauses before each response. We recommend disclosing it when it matters — see the etiquette note above.

Can I use my own cloned voice? Yes — natively, on Pro. Read a two-minute script in the side panel's Speak Mode settings and Gaavala builds a Soniox-powered clone you can select as your Speak Mode voice. No separate account or API key required.

What is the latency? Voice-start time varies with the selected voice, phrase length, connection and available processing route. Try your intended voice and language before the call; there is no guaranteed one- or two-second delay.

What if my target language is not English? Both voice options already speak all 60 languages Gaavala translates — the Soniox studio voices and your own clone work the same way regardless of target language, out of the box.

Does it work in Teams Premium meetings? Yes. Speak Mode works in any meeting that runs in a Chrome tab, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex. It does not matter whether the meeting organizer has Teams Premium or Copilot. Speak Mode runs on your side of the call, not on the meeting host's infrastructure.

Try It

Speak Mode is a Pro feature. If you are new to Gaavala, start on the one-time free trial — 5 minutes of transcription, no credit card required — so you can evaluate the incoming translation experience first. Speak Mode is not included in the free trial; upgrade to Pro ($19.99/month; Pro has no trial of its own) when you are ready to speak in the meeting yourself.

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Install Gaavala from the Chrome Web Store free, then upgrade to Pro to unlock Speak Mode.

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