A dubbing site that only speaks English is like a bar that doesn't serve coffee.
It sounds like a joke, but I mean it literally. Our entire promise is one sentence: you shouldn't have to understand another language to understand a video. Now imagine arriving at a site that promises you exactly that — and the first thing it does is show you buttons, prices and error messages in a language you don't read. Before you've even started, the product has contradicted itself.
I kept thinking about this, and I couldn't find a way around it. If understanding is the product, the product starts at the first screen.
Nobody notices this if they speak English
There's a reason this problem survives: the people who build these tools usually speak English, and the people who invest in them speak English, and everybody in that room finds the site perfectly clear.
I don't speak English well. I speak Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French, my German is passable, and my English is functional at best. So I've been on the other side of that screen for years. I know the exact feeling of wanting to use something, half-understanding what a button does, guessing, and quitting. Not because the tool was bad — because I was tired of translating in my head before I could even begin.
And our users are not developers. They're someone who found a two-hour lecture, a podcast, a tutorial from a creator they like, and just wants to understand it. If they have to work to understand us first, we've already lost them — and worse, we've proved our own idea wrong.
So we did the boring thing
The site now speaks 60 languages. Not the homepage headline machine-translated and nothing else: the menu, the pricing page, the FAQ, the account area, the emails we send you, and the error messages you see on a bad day. Each one translated by a native speaker and checked, not passed through a machine.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Anyone can auto-translate a landing page in an afternoon. The words people actually get stuck on are the small ones: the button that takes your money, the message that tells you why something failed, the word you have to type to delete your account. Those are the ones nobody bothers to translate properly, and those are exactly the ones where a person gives up.
It's not glamorous work. It doesn't demo well. It's the coffee: nobody praises a bar for having it, but a bar without it isn't a bar.
Understanding is the whole point
We say a child should be able to use Vaivox. That's not a slogan, it's the test we apply. A child doesn't read documentation, doesn't guess what "transcode" means, and definitely doesn't switch languages in their head. They either understand the screen in front of them or they leave.
So the rule we follow is simple: if we dub a video into your language, we can talk to you in it too. Everything else — the voices, the speed, the length of the videos — comes after that.
Because a site that helps you understand videos, in a language you don't understand, is a bar with no coffee. And we didn't want to be that.