Solo dev builds real-time translated caption Chrome extension for browser-based meetings
A solo developer has built a Chrome extension that displays live translated captions over browser-based meetings on Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams without any bot joining the call. The extension captures tab audio using Chrome's Manifest V3 architecture, which required an offscreen document workaround since service workers lack Web Audio and getUserMedia APIs. An early version used Deepgram for speech recognition and DeepL for translation, but sending incremental partial transcripts to DeepL inflated costs to roughly 2.53 times the characters of final-only translation, amounting to about $2.55 per hour of calls. The developer switched to Soniox's stt-rt-v5 model, which handles both recognition and translation in a single stream, eliminating the cost problem. Key limitations remain: the extension only works with browser tabs, excluding desktop Zoom and Teams apps and mobile devices, and tab capture permission resets after each page navigation.
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