Pinch (YC W25)

In 2026, real-time speech translation is no longer a feature - it's a baseline expectation. The question is no longer whether real-time voice translation exists. The real question: Can we carry a conversation across languages with the same ease as we would in our own?

Real-time voice translation used to be: Speech → Text → Translate → Text → Speech 🔁 But the field is shifting further. Now it’s going end-to-end. We are not completely at the finish line yet. The best systems today are hitting ~3-4 seconds of latency.

Great models don't come from one brilliant moment. They come from continuous iteration and learning from real-world feedback.🔁 We shipped, learned, and shipped again. And again. 🚀 Stay close folks, because something totally new is coming 👀

A model can speak 100 languages and still not understand a single culture. Multilingual - it understands the words. Multicultural - it understands what those words carry. Culture lives in how you say it. At @StartPinch, we preserve the character of the speaker.

7,000 languages exist. Only 5% are online. 95% of human languages are invisible to the digital world. @UNESCO calls this a human rights issue. We agree. Language shouldn't determine who gets to participate. That's why we build what we build. startpinch.com

Real-time speech-to-speech translation is a problem that's not fully solved yet. At Pinch, that's the problem we work on every day. Real conversation isn't just words - it's warmth, hesitation, emphasis, humor.

Researchers started asking: What if you could skip the text step entirely? 2022: Translatotron 2 - end-to-end speech-to-speech translation. Your voice, preserved. Then Meta, ElevenLabs, ByteDance, Kyutai all entered the race.

The idea of universal translation is older than computers by centuries 🌍 A thread on how we got from pure philosophy to real-time speech-to-speech 🧵

@ComfyUI integration repo: github.com/pinch-eng/comf…

Pinch integrations come with examples🔌 @n8n_io — example workflow as a JSON file, downloadable directly from our GitHub repository. Import it into your n8n platform! @ComfyUI — the Pinch translation node plugs right into your ComfyUI setup with full custom configuration.

@n8n_io integration repo: github.com/pinch-eng/n8n-…

Github link: github.com/pinch-eng/live…

Real-time language translation should be available, accessible, and easy to use. We're bringing real-time language translation to @LiveKit Agents with our open-source plugin. Get started with one line: pip install livekit-plugins-pinch

The video above is Spanish dubbed to English: Original speech volume: 80% Translation lag: 1s Reduce accent: off

One thing we love about Pinch Dubbing - the control it gives you! You're not just uploading a file and getting a translation back. You can fine-tune the entire experience. 🧵👇

Is Pinch's dubbing API actually that good? We tested it with someone bilingual: he spoke in his native language, we dubbed it into English, then had him speak in English himself. Now there are two English versions. Let’s compare👀