Nekko Live Interpreter

Nekko Live Interpreter is an iOS app that turns your iPhone into a real-time bilingual voice interpreter, designed specifically for hackathon demos and pitches where Japanese presenters need to speak to an English-speaking audience (and vice versa). You hold a single big button, speak in Japanese (or English), and the moment you release, a cute cat character (Nekko) speaks back the translation in the other language using OpenAI's Realtime API — all voice-to-voice, no typing, no waiting. The whole UI is just "Nekko + one button" on purpose: during a demo or Q&A you don't have time to look at transcripts or pick a direction. Push-to-talk solves the noisy-room problem (we kept getting interrupted by ambient conversations), and the strict translator-only prompt prevents the model from replying conversationally to phrases like "translate this". Built originally as a Mistral-based meeting recorder, we rebuilt the interpreter flow on top of OpenAI's gpt-realtime in ~1 day for this hackathon.