Side Projects

Real-time Japanese speech transcription with English translation, summaries, and response suggestions. Built for foreign residents in Japan who need to follow complex conversations.

I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan. While I feel comfortable using Japanese in most of daily life, neighborhood meetings were always a completely different story. I'd walk out feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what was discussed. The vocabulary, the speed, the local dialect. It was overwhelming and frustrating. I built Live Kaiwa to solve that problem for myself, and for anyone else living in Japan who has experienced that same feeling.

How it works:

1. Audio capture — The browser microphone streams audio over a WebSocket connection to Soniox's real-time speech-to-text API.
2. Transcription with speaker diarization — Soniox transcribes Japanese speech in real time and automatically identifies individual speakers. Translation to English happens in the same stream.
3. AI analysis — New transcript lines are sent to an LLM which streams back a running summary with action items and suggested responses you can speak aloud (with text-to-speech playback).
4. Visualizer — A conversation space view maps speakers, their relationships, and interaction dynamics (agreement, delegation, commitment) onto an interactive timeline you can replay at different speeds.
5. Export — Export the full transcript, translations, and summary as text, download the audio recording, or download the visualizer as a standalone HTML file.
6. Local persistence — All session data stays in your local browser. Nothing is stored on any server.

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A digital version of a board game I invented. A strategic 4-player memory and semi-cooperative game. Draft, coordinate, and outmaneuver opponents by completing patterns across a rotating 3D grid.

Players place colored sticks on the faces of a cube, drawing and playing cards to complete grid patterns for points. The twist: the cube rotates 90 degrees after every round, so you need to remember what's on the other sides. Cooperation cards let you team up with an opponent for bonus points but help them too much and they'll beat you.

How it works:

1. Setup — Each player gets 15 short sticks and 5 long sticks in their color, plus a starting hand of cards.
2. Actions — On your turn: place a stick, draw a card, discard a card, play a bonus card, or pass.
3. Rotation — The cube rotates 90 degrees clockwise after every 4 actions, requiring memory and planning.
4. Cooperation — Play cooperation cards to coordinate with an opponent for mutual bonus points.
5. Scoring — The game ends when a player runs out of short sticks. Points come from completed patterns, cooperation bonuses, and bonus cards.

How to play: