A few years ago I was sitting in a quarterly review at a company I was working with — a multinational with operating teams across Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, and a handful of other cities.
The meeting was conducted in English. Most people in the room could follow English. Many fewer could participate in English. So what happened, predictably, was that the same five or six people did most of the talking, and the rest nodded politely. After the call, half the action items got re-explained over Slack in each local language. Decisions made in the meeting got partially re-litigated by people who'd missed the nuance the first time.
This isn't a story about that one company. It's a story about every international company I've worked with. The cost of "we just run meetings in English" is invisible until you measure it — and then it's enormous.
What we tried first
The obvious first move was a human translator. The company hired one. It worked, sort of. But:
- It only covered one language pair per session.
- It doubled the time of any meeting.
- It cost roughly the salary of a senior engineer per year.
- It didn't scale to the 50+ daily cross-language meetings happening across the company.
The next move was a third-party translation tool. We tried one. It had no API. The transcripts and translations sat on someone else's servers, behind someone else's UI, with no way to bulk-export, search across meetings, or feed the data back into our own systems. For a company that takes data sovereignty seriously, that was a non-starter.
What we built instead
Sageio is the thing we wished existed.
It's a bot that joins your Google Meet (or any meeting platform we end up supporting) as a regular participant. While the meeting is happening, every word spoken is transcribed in the original language, then translated — in under two seconds — to whatever language each participant has chosen. Captions show up in each person's own browser window. The host doesn't have to do anything different. Nobody is forced to read someone else's translation.
Five minutes after the meeting ends, the host gets an AI-generated summary in their inbox: decisions, action items, open questions. The full transcript, with both original and translated text, is searchable across every past meeting from one place.
We support 20+ languages today, with serious quality in the ones we care about most — Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Cantonese — because that's the corner of the world where the gap was loudest for us.
Where this is going
Right now Sageio is in active production use at a multinational pilot customer running 50+ cross-language meetings a week. They've been on it daily for about three months. Today we're opening it up for the rest of the world — small and mid-sized international teams who run cross-language meetings and want the same thing we wanted: a meeting where everyone actually participates.
If that sounds like something your team needs, start a free trial. The first 60 minutes are on us; no card required.
More posts coming — on what we learned building this, on the surprising things about real-time translation that don't show up until you ship to real users, and on the broader bet that the best B2B products are still the ones built by people who had the problem first.
Thanks for reading.
— Ming