A bot that sat in our family WhatsApp groups. Our nanny sent a voice note in Thai, and it replied with the same note in English and Hebrew. It did that for five months.
🇬🇧The baby ate all her rice and is napping now.🇮🇱התינוקת אכלה את כל האורז ועכשיו היא ישנה.🇹🇭น้องกินข้าวหมดแล้ว ตอนนี้กำลังนอนกลางวันค่ะ
Example message. The last line is what it heard.
Voice notes went to Gemini 2.5 Flash as audio. One call heard the note and translated it.
Text was translated only when someone tagged @ninja, so busy chats stayed quiet.
Thai typed in a group could be set to translate on its own, no tag needed.
Each person picked how much it tidied their words, from word-for-word to a clean rewrite.
Five months, in numbers
17,440translations
7,500voice notes
56 hof audio heard
$9.60total Gemini bill
420groups
3main languages: English, Thai, Hebrew
Why it stopped
It was a fun experiment. WhatsApp will ship the real thing soon enough, and I'll use that.
The code
It stays on GitHub under the MIT license. The repo is archived, so there are no more fixes, but it runs. It speaks WhatsApp through an unofficial client, so use a spare number you can afford to lose.