About Tolk

Who builds it

Tolk is built by Anwar Sahraoui, founder of Voicelabs, a small company in the Netherlands that makes voice software: Tolk for conversations in the same room, and Bridgecall for translated video calls. He writes the comparisons and guides on this site himself.

Why Tolk exists

Tolk started after too many literal mistranslations in Vietnam and Thailand. A translator app that turns words into words gets tonal languages, politeness and context wrong, and the person across the table hears something you did not mean. Tolk translates meaning first: it uses the conversation as context, decides how the sentence should land in the other language and speaks that out loud, hands-free, in both directions.

How we test

Every comparison on this site comes from real conversations, not demo sentences: markets, taxis, family dinners and hotel desks, in the language pairs our users run most. For each app we check the same six things: whether it listens without a tap per sentence, whether it speaks both sides out loud, whether the meaning survives in a tonal or politeness-heavy language, which languages the voice mode really covers, what a week of travel costs, and whether the other person needs to install anything. Prices and language counts are checked in the US App Store and Google Play and dated on the page.

We make Tolk, and the comparisons say so. Where a free app does the job, the guide says that too.

Languages

Tolk speaks more than 50 languages. The pages below explain what changes in each one: Tagalog, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Slovak.

Contact

Questions, corrections or a language pair you would like us to test: hello@tolktranslator.com.