Launch HN: Cuckoo (YC W25) – Real-time AI translator for global teams
Hey HN! We’re Yong Hee and Gunwoo from Cuckoo (https://cuckoo.so), a real-time AI translator for global sales, marketing, and support. Companies like Snowflake and PagerDuty use us in Zoom calls and in-person meetings, including for technical discussions. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKU1fj3rxh4.

With Cuckoo, you get an always-available, real-time translator that adapts to your conversations, helping teams avoid wasted time from language frictions.

Language barriers are still a big challenge for companies with offices in different countries. I experienced this firsthand at my previous company in Korea when I invited international speakers to our meetups. Much of the nuance and technical details were lost, even though many attendees spoke adequate English. Speakers often felt isolated, unable to understand Korean discussions, and missed out on opportunities to network and market their products—despite these events being organized for customer interactions.

Meetings with interpreters are often twice as long, and details are lost in translation. Sometimes a bilingual colleague steps in as an interpreter, but they’d be far more valuable focusing on their core roles. If you are a sales engineer or customer success engineer, this gets worse with highly complex and technical topics.

While LLMs work well for translating written text, they struggle with real-time spoken translation. For example, OpenAI’s Realtime API only handles turn-by-turn interpretation, which doesn’t work for dynamic conversations. One of our customers used to record meetings with OBS, upload the recordings to an AI notetaker, and wait for translated notes—but that’s hardly real-time.

Cuckoo works by inviting a bot to your Zoom meeting. You can contextualize translations by uploading relevant documents like pitch decks or product manuals. You can share the live transcript with your customers and teammates with a link. It also works in person.

We’ve been surprised by the range of use cases. Snowflake uses Cuckoo to host international customers in their Customer Experience Centers and Weights & Biases runs VIP roundtables in Seoul. VP of Sales at a high-growth startup closed enterprise deals in Japan and an early-stage founder in SF connected with their first user in Turkey.

Many of our users include engineers who face language barriers in technical conversations. For example, a solution engineer at PagerDuty uses Cuckoo to troubleshoot integrations with local partners in Korea and Japan. These conversations are often full of technical jargon, APIs, and organizational context. By uploading relevant documents like API docs, they ensure translations are accurate and context-aware, reducing misunderstandings and inefficiencies.

On Privacy and Security: like human interpreters, we sign NDAs to protect sensitive information. Transcripts can be set to self-destruct after meetings, and we’re working toward ISO 27001 and SOC I/II certifications. If you delete your account, all associated data is erased immediately and irreversibly.

You can sign up with just an email and name. After signing up, you can copy and paste your Zoom or MS Teams link to have Cuckoo join your meeting. We provide a quick 60-minute free trial, but if you need more, please let me know at yonghee@cuckoo.so. We’d be happy to extend it for HN users!.

The best way to understand Cuckoo is to try it out for one of your upcoming global meetings. It takes <3 minutes to get started. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback in the comments!