TeaTalk v0.1.0-alpha.2

Alpha build for trusted testers — Windows x64, self-contained (no install; unzip and run TeaTools.App.exe).

What's new since the 2026-07-17 build

💬 Live captions (opt-in preview)

TeaTalk can now show your words in the chatbox as you speak, before the finished translation arrives. OFF by default — try it via TeaTalk settings → Chatbox → "Live captions". Flipping it briefly pauses listening while the pipeline restarts; that's normal. It's a preview: if anything feels off, flip it back off and tell us what you saw.

🔧 Fixed: repeated/doubled words

With Live captions on, longer sentences could come back with words repeated or doubled before translation — garbling what got sent. Root-caused and fixed; verified in a live session before this release.

🔒 Privacy fix: mute is decided the moment you speak

In a rare timing window, speech that started while your VRChat mic was muted could still reach the chatbox with mute set to Pause STT. The mute decision is now locked at the instant you start speaking and can't be raced.

🔍 Under the hood

Much sharper latency + diagnostic logging (per-stage timings in %AppData%\TeaTools\logs). When something feels slow, the log now shows exactly which stage did it — and if you opted into crash reporting on first run, much of that reaches us automatically.

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Coming from a build before 2026-07-17? You also have: typed messages send even while your mic is muted, the OSC port-in-use startup crash fix, better "it hears nothing" microphone diagnostics, and small-window layout fixes.

Full details ship in the zip (RELEASE-NOTES.txt + docs/). Rough edges expected — tell us what breaks. 🙏

TeaTalk v0.1.0-alpha.1

Say it once. They read it in their language.

Real-time speech translation for VRChat. You talk normally; the people around you read it in their language, right in the in-game chatbox — while you keep talking.

Free to use · No account · Windows

What it feels like

You join a world, someone says hi in a language you don't speak, and you just... answer. You speak normally into your mic. A beat later, your words land in the VRChat chatbox in their language — no menus, no stopping mid-sentence, no copy-pasting into another window. Flip to transcribe mode and it captions your own voice instead, clean and live.

It works the first time you open it. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to pay.

Why you'll like it

• 🗣️ Speak, don't type. Your voice becomes chatbox text in another language while you keep talking.
• 🆓 Free out of the box. Speech recognition runs on your PC (local Whisper); translation is built in (Microsoft Edge, with automatic fallback to Google). No account, no API key.
• 🌐 Auto-detects your language. Just talk — TeaTalk figures out what you're speaking. Prefer to pin one language? Pick it, and local recognition gets faster.
• 🔀 Translate or transcribe. Post your words in another language, or caption your own speech as-is. One click to switch.
• 📝 Reads the way you want. Show the original first, the translation first, or translation only.
• 🔇 Mute players are first-class here. Keep your VRChat mic muted, switch on Ignore mute, and TeaTalk still turns your speech into chatbox text — so you're in the conversation while your voice stays off.
• 🧠 Optional: bring your own key. Point TeaTalk at your own OpenRouter model for conversation-aware translation — the free path needs no key.

Download

1. Download TeaTools-alpha.zip below and unzip anywhere (your Desktop is fine).
2. Run the app — nothing else to install.
3. In VRChat, enable OSC: Action Menu (R) → Options → OSC → Enabled. TeaTalk finds VRChat automatically once OSC is on.

First launch: Windows may show a SmartScreen notice because the app isn't code-signed yet — click More info → Run anyway. (Alpha; signing comes later.)

You'll need: Windows (64-bit) · VRChat with OSC enabled · a microphone.

Build refreshed 2026-07-15 (0502e0b): adds internal speech-timing diagnostics so tester reports pinpoint transcription lag. No user-facing feature changes since the initial build.

What's new in v0.1.0-alpha.1

• Auto-detect is the default. Fresh installs detect your spoken language automatically and translate each phrase from what you actually spoke, on every engine. There's a new "Detect language" option at the top of the picker. Already set a language? Nothing changes — and picking one is still the faster path.
• Faster, more accurate recognition when you pick your language. Setting your language locks local speech-to-text onto it instead of guessing every phrase; changing it mid-session (including pressing Swap) re-locks right away. This now works for every language in the picker, and uses all your CPU cores.
• Respect VRChat mute now works even if you were already muted when TeaTalk started — it reads your current mute state from VRChat the moment it connects and holds your speech until it knows. Muted means muted.
• Reliability: speech recognition survives engine hiccups (a cloud timeout no longer silently kills transcription for the session); unplugging your mic stops listening honestly instead of pretending it's still on; and the free translator recovers faster during an outage.
• Honest diagnostics wording. Crash/problem uploads were called "anonymous" — they're not: no account or identifier is attached, but logs can include file paths from your PC. The wording now says so plainly, and crash reports strip your Windows username from those paths.
• Overhearing others is strictly opt-in — turning it off stops the listening itself, not just the messages.
• Safer builds and a batch of concurrency/shutdown edge cases hardened out.

Known rough edge: auto-detect judges each phrase on its own, so very short or noisy clips can occasionally be detected as the wrong language. If that bites you, pick your language in TeaTalk — it's also faster.

How it works (and what's free)

The default path is free and runs on your machine: speech becomes text on your PC with local Whisper (your voice audio isn't sent to a server on this path), and translation uses free, keyless engines (Microsoft Edge, falling back to Google automatically). No account, no key, no catch.

Optional power-user mode: add your own OpenRouter key and translation works like a conversation — conversation memory carries context between lines, a glossary keeps names/jargon consistent, and links and @mentions survive intact. Any keys you add are encrypted on your PC (Windows DPAPI) and never leave it. You never need a key to use TeaTalk.

Provider names (Whisper, Microsoft Edge, Google, OpenRouter, VRChat) describe what TeaTalk connects to — not endorsements.

This is an alpha 🌱

TeaTalk is early and built in the open. Expect rough edges, expect things to change. Built in the open on Discord — the feedback you leave now steers what ships. If something breaks, the in-app "Report a problem" button is the fastest way to help fix it.

License

TeaTalk is part of TeaTools — released under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 (free to use, not open-source-for-commercial-use).