SidebySpeak VS MirrorCaption

SidebySpeak's answer

SidebySpeak puts live translated captions right in your browser tab during Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams calls, with the original speech and the translation shown side by side. No bot joins your call, and the host doesn't have to set anything up. It translates the meeting audio and, if you turn it on, your own microphone, in 60 languages.

MirrorCaption's answer:

MirrorCaption puts live captions and live translation on screen while people are still talking — not after the call, and not after the sentence ends. Words stream in as they are spoken, so both sides of a conversation read what is being said in their own language within about a second.

A few things that are unusual about how it does that:

• No bot, no plugin, no download. It works with whatever audio is there — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex, a phone on the table, or an in-person meeting in a conference room. Nothing gets invited into the meeting.
• Tap-to-compare highlighting. Touch a translated word to see the exact original word behind it, so you can check the translation instead of trusting it blindly.
• A vocabulary list you build as you go, which is why language learners and students keep it open beside their lectures.
• Automatic speaker detection, so a five-person meeting still tells you who said what.
• AI summaries while the meeting is still running, with action items and decisions pulled out at the end.
• Transcripts stay on your device, stored locally in your browser or app rather than collected into a cloud archive you have to trust.
• Interface in 25 languages, so the person you are helping never has to navigate an English-only screen.

SidebySpeak's answer

Most meeting tools either send a bot into your call or only give you notes afterward. SidebySpeak translates live, in your own browser, with nothing to install on the meeting side. Saved transcripts stay in your browser instead of on our servers. And pricing is simple: 20 free minutes every month with no card required, paid plans from $9.99/month for 600 minutes, and team plans from $79.99/month with no per-seat fees.

MirrorCaption's answer:

Most meeting AI tools are recorders: you invite a bot into the call, it sits there, and afterwards you get a transcript and a summary. MirrorCaption is built for the conversation while it is still happening.

• It works where a bot cannot go. An in-person meeting in a conference room, a phone on the table, a lecture hall, a clinic front desk. There is no call to invite anything into.
• It translates as people talk, streaming word by word instead of waiting for the sentence to end. Both sides read what is being said in their own language within about a second.
• Nothing to install. It runs in a browser, on your phone, or on your Mac or Windows desktop. No plugin, no download, no meeting bot.
• You can check the translation. Tap-to-compare highlighting shows the exact original word behind any translated word, so you are not asked to trust the machine blindly.
• Speaker detection keeps a five-person meeting readable — you still know who said what.
• Summaries run while the meeting is still going, with action items and decisions pulled out at the end, rather than arriving an hour later.
• Transcripts stay on your device, stored locally in your browser or app rather than collected into a cloud archive you have to trust.
• The interface itself is in 25 languages, so the person you are helping never has to navigate an English-only screen.

SidebySpeak's answer

People who join calls in a language they don't fully speak. That includes remote teams working across countries, people meeting international clients or partners, and language learners who want to follow real conversations. Its optional Learn mode turns words from calls into flashcards.

MirrorCaption's answer:

People whose work goes multilingual mid-conversation and who cannot afford to slow down.

• Cross-border business teams — a support engineer in Manchester on a Teams call with a supplier in Shenzhen.
• International support and sales — a sales team running a demo for a prospect in São Paulo.
• Clinics and public services — a front desk registering someone who speaks another language.
• Universities and online courses — an international student following a fast-paced lecture in a second language, reading live translated captions in their own language while the lecturer keeps talking, then leaving with a full transcript and summary instead of half a page of notes.
• Language learners, who use the live vocabulary list and tap-to-compare highlighting to study from real speech rather than textbook sentences.

The common thread is that these are all situations where waiting for a translation, or inviting a bot into the room, is not an option.

SidebySpeak's answer

SidebySpeak is a Chrome and Edge browser extension. Live speech recognition and translation run on Soniox. Learn mode, flashcards and transcript summaries use OpenAI.

MirrorCaption's answer:

• Frontend: React 19 and TypeScript, built with Vite and styled with Tailwind CSS. The whole capture-and-caption experience runs in the browser (or Desktop Client).
• Realtime edge: Cloudflare sits between the browser and the speech engine, so the audio stream is handled at the edge.
• Backend: Supabase — Postgres plus edge functions.
• Mobile apps: Capacitor, with native audio capture written per platform so the app can keep listening in the background.
• Speech and language: a streaming speech-to-text engine that emits words as they are spoken, paired with LLM-based translation and summarisation.
• On-device storage: transcripts and session history live in the browser's IndexedDB on the user's own machine rather than in a server-side archive.
• Hosting: Vercel.

MirrorCaption's answer:

I am a programmer at an international company, and MirrorCaption started with a problem I had in my own meetings every week. My foreign-language skills are good enough — I can follow a conversation. But following and catching every detail are not the same thing. In a fast meeting, with several people talking over each other, an accent I am not used to, a number or a name or a caveat mentioned once in passing, I would come away with the gist and a quiet worry about what I had missed. Asking someone to repeat themselves a third time is not really something you do on a call with eight people on it. Speech technology had finally become good enough to fix that, so I built the thing I wanted: live captions and live translation on screen while people are still talking, so I could read the detail I had only half-heard without interrupting anyone. I use it every day. That is the part that matters most for the product. Every rough edge I run into, I fix — including the small ones, the kind a team that only ever demos its own software would never notice. I am MirrorCaption's heaviest user, and I would not put something in front of you that I was not relying on myself the same afternoon.