Navigating Kalima
Find your way around the dashboard, sessions list, the Studio, search, and settings.
This page is a quick orientation tour. Once you know where the sidebar, the Studio, search, and settings live, everything else in Kalima is easy to find. Use it as a map for "where do I do X?"
The big picture
Kalima is built around three areas you'll move between constantly: the sidebar (your sessions, workspaces, projects, and search), the Studio (where you record and read transcripts), and your account settings. The same account and data follow you across the web app and the desktop app, so anything you record in one shows up in the other.
The sidebar
The sidebar is where you find and organize everything you've recorded. It holds your list of sessions, the search box, and the folders you use to keep things tidy.
Sessions and history
Every recording and uploaded file becomes a session. Your sessions appear in the sidebar list so you can reopen, continue, or review any of them. Opening a session takes you straight into the Studio with its transcript, audio, and tools.
Workspaces and projects
Two kinds of folders help you organize sessions:
- Workspaces are personal sidebar folders for grouping your work, for example "Work", "Personal", or one per client. Each gets a name, an icon, and a color, and you can drag to reorder them. Workspaces are private to you.
- Projects are folders for sessions that also share default transcription settings (such as expected languages and audio quality) and can be shared with collaborators by role. A project can hold sub-projects one level deep, so a client can have a project per engagement.
A handy rule of thumb: use workspaces to tidy your own view, and use projects when you want sessions to share settings or be worked on with other people. Learn more in Workspaces and Projects.
Search across your sessions
At the top of the sessions sidebar is a search box that searches more than just titles. It looks inside the actual words spoken in your transcripts and translations.
Results are ranked by relevance and show a short highlighted snippet of where your term appears. Expand a result to see the individual matching transcript segments, then click a segment to open that session and jump the audio straight to that word.
Search only covers sessions saved to the cloud, and it runs on Kalima's servers, so it needs an internet connection. If a search can't reach the server, it falls back to matching session titles only. Very rapid repeated searches may be briefly throttled.
Inside the Studio
The Studio is where the real work happens. It's the same place whether you're recording live, reviewing a finished session, or watching one that someone shared with you.
The transcript toolbar
Most reading controls live in a toolbar above the transcript: a layout toggle (side-by-side vs. stacked original and translation), a display filter (All, Original, Translation), a text-size slider, a clear-transcript button, and a fullscreen button. While you're recording live, the view auto-scrolls to the newest text; scroll up to read earlier content and a floating button brings you back to the latest. See The Transcript Editor for the full tour.
The audio player
When a session has a recording, an audio player sits with the transcript. It plays back what you captured with word-by-word highlighting that follows along like karaoke, and clicking any word jumps playback to that moment. Read more in Playback & Karaoke.
Find your way around: where do I find X?
Account and settings
Your account settings are where you manage who you are and how Kalima behaves for you.
Switching the interface language
Kalima's interface is fully available in English and German. Use the language switcher (the globe or flag control in the app rail) to choose between them; your choice is remembered for next time. This is separate from the languages you transcribe and translate. Changing the interface language does not change your transcription languages. See Language Settings for the details.
Notifications and announcements
Kalima keeps you informed about account, team, and billing events, such as an invitation to an organization, a subscription change, or a warning as you approach a usage limit. Important updates can arrive both in the app and by email. From time to time you may also see a system banner across the top of the app announcing planned maintenance or a service incident; it disappears once the notice is no longer active.
Working offline and across devices
Kalima saves your session data, transcripts, and recordings locally as you work, so a brief connection drop won't cost you anything.
- If you go offline, you'll see an Offline indicator. If Kalima's servers can't be reached, a dedicated offline screen appears with a Retry Connection button, and you're returned to the Studio automatically once you're back online.
- Pending work (saving a session, syncing transcript segments and audio, finishing a recording) is queued and completed the next time you're online, even after you close the tab.
Locally saved work lives in the browser or device you used. Clearing your site data, or switching to a different device or browser, won't carry over anything that hadn't finished syncing to the cloud yet.
Install Kalima as an app
On supported browsers you can install Kalima so it opens in its own window with a home-screen or desktop icon, plus quick shortcuts to start recording or join a session. Look for an Install button or banner while using Kalima; on iPhone and iPad, use Safari's Share menu and choose Add to Home Screen. This browser install is separate from the downloadable desktop app.
Frequently asked questions
Both. It searches session names plus the spoken words in your transcripts and translations, ranks the results, highlights where the match is, and lets you click straight to that moment in the audio.
Search only covers sessions that are saved to the cloud, so unsaved or local-only drafts won't appear. Search also needs an internet connection; if it can't reach the server it falls back to matching session titles only.
A workspace is a personal sidebar folder just for grouping your own sessions. A project is a folder of sessions that also carries shared transcription settings and can be shared with collaborators. Use workspaces to tidy your view and projects to standardize settings or collaborate.
The interface is fully available in English and German. You can switch between them with the language switcher, and your choice is remembered next time.
No. The web app and the desktop app share the same account and the same data, so your sessions and settings are available wherever you sign in.
Next steps
Now that you know your way around, jump into the parts of Kalima you'll use most.