Transync AI, and where Fraze fits

What Transync AI does

• Live bilingual subtitles, with a floating window that stays above other apps on Mac and Windows, and a presentation mode where an audience follows on their own devices by link or QR code.
• AI voice playback that reads the translation aloud, voice cloning, and a virtual microphone that can speak the translation into a call.
• Capture from your microphone or from computer audio. Its site says this works with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet with no meeting bot and no browser extension.
• AI meeting notes with summaries and action items, and speaker separation that labels who said what. Transync marks speaker separation as beta.
• One-way, two-way and multilingual modes, with data synced across its Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and web apps.

Transync's pages claim an average delay under half a second and a word error rate under 5 percent, and its languages page gives an accuracy rate of 92 to 95 percent. Those are the company's own figures and we could not find a published test method, so read them as claims. Its help docs name one limit worth knowing: the web version can only take sound from a browser tab, so for a desktop meeting app you want the Mac or Windows app. Its download page says support for Intel Macs and 32-bit Windows has been discontinued.

Transync AI pricing at the time of checking

On its pricing page today: Free is 40 minutes of real-time translation on sign-up. Personal Premium is $8.99 a month and includes 10 hours of use, with the allowance resetting monthly. Its help page says unused membership hours do not carry over. Enterprise is $24.99 a month per seat with up to 40 hours per seat per month, and use beyond that is charged to the organization at $0.70 an hour. Paying members can also buy hour packs, which Transync calls time cards: $7.99 for 10 hours, $22.99 for 30 hours and $69.99 for 100 hours. The help page says time cards do not expire but freeze while you have no active membership. Its App Store listing also shows a yearly Premium purchase at $89.99.

One line on that page is easy to miss. Transync says one-way and two-way translation count at the standard rate, multilingual translation starts at 3 languages for 2x usage, each extra language adds 1x, and 10 languages runs at 9x usage. So an hour in multilingual mode with four languages uses three hours of your allowance. Prices and allowances change, so check the page before you buy.

Where your audio goes

Transync is a hosted service. Its quickstart has you install the app and create an account, and its own blog says Transync AI requires an internet connection and does not currently support offline translation. When its pages talk about offline meetings or scenarios, they mean in-person conversations, not use without internet. Its privacy policy says the global service's production environment and business data are hosted in the United States, that a separate China environment is hosted in mainland China, and that third-party speech, translation and infrastructure providers may process the data solely to provide the service. The same policy says Transync does not retain meeting recording files and destroys them immediately after translation, does not use your original or translated meeting text for AI training, and requires its API providers not to either. The text of your sessions stays in your account until you delete it, which the policy says is permanent.

Fraze is the other shape. Turning speech into text and translating it both happen on your computer, and after the first download of the language files it keeps working with Wi-Fi off. Transcripts are stored on your machine in a history list you can export or copy. A free Fraze account is needed and it carries your plan, but it never sees audio or transcript text.

Whichever you use, remember that in some places you have to tell the other people in a conversation before you transcribe it.

Side by side

Transync says 60 or more languages and 1,770 or more language pairs. Fraze transcribes 25 European languages, plus more on macOS 26 or later, including Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and translates about 50 languages to or from English, with other pairs going through English. After the free minutes, Transync counts hours and Fraze has no meter, because the work runs on hardware you already own.

Which one to pick

• Pick Transync if you need the translation spoken aloud, in the room or into a call. Fraze has no read-aloud.
• Pick Transync if you need it on a phone or in a browser. Fraze is a desktop app only.
• Pick Transync if you want meeting notes and speaker labels afterwards. Fraze saves a plain transcript and nothing else.
• Pick Transync if Fraze does not transcribe your language. Transync lists 60, including Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic and Hindi.
• Pick Fraze if the words may not leave the machine, if you watch or meet for many hours a week and do not want a meter, or if you work somewhere with bad Wi-Fi.

Fraze listens to everything your computer plays, so a call, a video, a stream or a game all work the same way, as does the microphone for someone in the room. Captions land about half a second to a second after a speaker pauses.

There is a middle option. Verli (verli.app), the cloud sibling from the same company, runs in a browser, covers more languages and adds summaries and share links, but the audio goes to the cloud.

Questions