Haswell Creative — Case Study 02
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PolyglotLive · Travel & logistics · Concept

Two people talking at once, in two languages

Every translation app on the market makes two people take turns pressing a button. PolyglotLive keeps both microphones open, splits the screen so each person reads their own language the right way up, and renders the translation in the speaker's own voice.

Role
Product strategy, brand identity, interface design, audio engineering
Year
2026 — self-directed concept
Deliverables
Identity, full-duplex audio and turn-taking specification, phone and foldable layouts, operator glossary model, interactive prototype
A warehouse supervisor in a hi-vis vest and a delivery driver standing across a steel table from each other, both looking down at a phone lying flat between them.
Bay 4, shift handover. The phone goes face up on the table and nobody touches it again.

The problem

Real conversations do not take turns. People overlap, interrupt, trail off and finish each other's sentences. Half-duplex translation flattens all of that into a queue, and the moment you hand someone a phone to read from, you have made them a passenger in their own conversation.

That matters most where the stakes are concrete rather than social — a driver who has to leave by eleven, a customs form nobody can find, a part number that has to be right. Those exchanges are short, overlapping, and full of vocabulary specific to one site.

They also happen in places with no signal. A loading dock, a ferry terminal, a field service call: anywhere a round trip to a server is not something you can design around.

The approach

Four moves, in order.

01

Keep both microphones open

The two channels run continuously with echo cancellation between them, so an interruption ducks the outgoing voice instead of cutting it dead, and re-queues the unfinished clause behind it.

02

Translate in the speaker's own voice

A short enrolment sample carries timbre, pace and pauses into the target language. People answer a voice that sounds like a person; they argue with a kiosk.

03

Follow the posture, not the settings

Flat on a table, folded into a tent, or nothing but earbuds. The layout follows how the device is actually being held, reading hinge angle directly rather than asking anyone to choose a mode mid-conversation.

04

Let the site own its vocabulary

Bay numbers, part codes and customs terms come from a glossary the operator maintains, so the handful of words that carry real consequences are never guessed at.

The work

What we designed.

One screen, two right ways up

Table mode. The upper half is drawn upside down on purpose, so the person opposite reads their own language the right way up without anyone turning the phone around.

Setting up, and what runs underneath

Setup, the duplex monitor and the voice controls. The monitor is a diagnostic view rather than a daily one, but it is where the behaviour that makes the product work is visible.

The hinge is an input

Past roughly 100 degrees a foldable stops being a big phone and becomes two facing displays. The hinge angle is read directly, so standing the device up between you is the whole interaction.

What the depot keeps

The record a depot actually needs. Site vocabulary comes from a glossary the operator controls, so the words that carry liability are never improvised.
Two people talking across a counter at a covered market in warm afternoon light, with a phone lying flat on the counter between them.
The same interaction with no infrastructure at all: a counter, two strangers and one phone face up.
A foldable phone standing open in tent posture on a wooden cafe table between two seated people.
Tent posture in the wild. The device becomes furniture on the table rather than an object one person holds.

Design targets

What it has to hit before anyone would rely on it.

250ms

Mouth to ear, or people start talking over the translation

0 taps

From placing the phone down to the first translated sentence

100%

Offline for the core language pair — a loading dock has no signal

0 frames

Of audio leaving the device unless a transcript is kept

These are design targets, not measured results. PolyglotLive is a self-directed concept: it has not been built, and nothing here has been measured on shipping hardware.