Dev builds Chrome extension for live translated captions on Meet, Zoom and Teams
An independent developer has built a Chrome extension that displays real-time translated captions for browser-based video calls on Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams, without requiring a bot to join the call. The extension captures tab audio using Chrome's MV3 service worker architecture and an offscreen document, routing the stream back to speakers so users can still hear the call. Early versions used separate Deepgram and DeepL services for speech recognition and translation, but interim-result retranslation inflated costs to roughly $2.55 per hour of call. The developer switched to Soniox's stt-rt-v5 model, which handles both recognition and translation in a single stream, reducing complexity and cost. Key technical hurdles included handling stale tab capture locks, managing activeTab permission resets after page navigation, and correctly parsing server-side end-of-line signals undocumented by the provider.
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