What Is Kalima?
An overview of Kalima, what it does, who it is for, and how live transcription, translation, and AI fit together.
Kalima turns spoken conversations into accurate, searchable text in real time, then helps you understand, share, and act on what was said. In a meeting, a lecture, an interview, or a video call, Kalima captures the words as they happen, separates the speakers, translates on the fly, and gives you AI tools to summarize and question the result. It detects more than 60 languages automatically, runs on both web and desktop from the same account, and has AI built in for summaries, chat, and cleanup.
This page is the big-picture tour. It covers what Kalima does, who it is for, and how the main pieces (sessions, the Studio, transcripts, projects, and teams) fit together.
What Kalima does
At its core, Kalima listens to audio and writes down what it hears instantly, with the right speakers and languages attached. Around that core sits everything you need to make a transcript useful: translation, editing, AI, playback, sharing, and team collaboration.
Who Kalima is for
Kalima is built for anyone who needs a reliable record of what was said, and it scales from one person to a whole company.
- Individuals capturing meetings, lectures, interviews, calls, talks, or personal notes.
- Teams that want shared projects, consistent transcription settings, and one place for their recordings.
- Organizations with multiple teams, member roles, shared balances, and centralized billing.
- Enterprises that need custom limits, single sign-on, custom branding, and dedicated support.
- Anyone using captions for accessibility, who needs live, on-screen text of a conversation.
A common use is live meeting notes: start a session, let it transcribe and translate as people talk, then generate an AI summary with the decisions and action items the moment the meeting ends.
How the pieces fit together
A handful of building blocks show up everywhere in Kalima. Once you know these five terms, the rest of the product clicks into place.
Sessions
A session is a single recording or transcript: one meeting, one lecture, one uploaded file. It holds the audio, the transcript, the detected languages, the speakers, any translation, and the AI results you generate. Everything you do in Kalima centers on a session.
The Studio
The Studio is where the action happens. From the Studio you choose your microphone or system audio, set your languages and translation, press record, and watch the transcript form live. After you stop, the same Studio becomes your editor and player, so you can read, search, clean up, play back, and export the transcript there.
Transcripts
The transcript is the finished text of a session. Kalima first shows a fast preliminary version of each phrase, then settles it into confirmed text a moment later. Every word is time-aligned to the audio, so during playback the current word highlights in sync and you can click any word to jump straight to that moment.
Projects and workspaces
As your sessions add up, two tools keep them organized:
- Workspaces are personal folders. Name them, color them, and drop your sessions in to keep your own history tidy.
- Projects go further: they store shared transcription settings (language hints, translation, audio quality, and context) and can be shared with collaborators so a whole team works the same way.
Teams and organizations
For groups, an organization brings members, teams, shared balances, and billing together in one place. You can invite people, assign roles, group them into teams, and control how usage is funded, all from your own organization settings.
Built to survive interruptions
Live transcription is only useful if you can trust it not to drop your words. Kalima keeps recording locally even when the network does not cooperate, and fills the transcript back in afterward.
- If your connection drops or transcription stalls, recording keeps going on your device and Kalima reconnects automatically.
- The stretch that was missed is re-transcribed and merged back into the transcript in the right place, marked so you can see what was recovered.
- You can even record fully offline and let Kalima transcribe the whole take once you are back online.
- A live latency indicator, green when results are arriving fast and amber when they slow down, tells you the session is healthy at a glance.
Recording is metered against your balance. You will see a low-balance warning before time runs out, then a short grace countdown, so there are no surprise overages, and a brief Wi-Fi blip never costs you your words.
Learn more in Reliability and recovery.
Where Kalima runs
Kalima works right in your browser and also as an installable desktop app, and both share the same account and the same data.
| Capability | Web app | Desktop app |
|---|---|---|
| Live transcription and translation | Yes | Yes |
| File uploads | Yes | Yes |
| Microphone and system audio capture | Yes | Yes (native capture) |
| Meeting detection and auto-recording | No | Yes |
| Screen and video recording | No | Yes |
| Picture-in-picture and stealth mode | No | Yes |
| Runs in the background / system tray | No | Yes |
The web app is the fastest way to start, with nothing to install. The desktop app adds power features for people who record meetings often: it can detect your video calls, capture meeting audio natively, record your screen locally, and stay running in the tray. You can also install the web app to your home screen or desktop for one-tap access.
Make AI work for you
Once a session has a transcript, Kalima's AI tools turn it into something you can act on without re-reading every line. AI output is written in your account's language and streams in as it is written.
AI usage is metered by weekly quotas that vary by plan, and higher plans automatically get an enhanced, higher-quality summary. See AI usage and limits for the details.
Frequently asked questions
No. Kalima runs entirely in your web browser, so you can sign in and start your first session with nothing to install. If you record meetings often, the optional desktop app adds extras like meeting detection, native system-audio capture, and screen recording. Both share the same account and data.
No. Kalima detects the spoken language automatically and even handles conversations that switch languages mid-sentence. If you already know what will be spoken, you can add expected-language hints to improve accuracy. See Languages and detection.
Yes. You can translate live, one-way into a single target language or two-way between two languages at once, with the original and translation shown together. See Live translation.
Recording keeps going and your audio is saved locally. Kalima reconnects automatically and re-transcribes anything that was missed, merging it back into the transcript in the correct place. You can even record fully offline and transcribe afterward. See Reliability and recovery.
Yes. Speakers are separated and labeled automatically (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on), each with a distinct color, and you can rename them to real names that carry through to your exports. See Speakers and diarization.
Yes. Upload an audio or video file and Kalima produces a full transcript with speaker labels, automatic language detection, and optional translation. Processing runs in the background, so you can leave and come back. See Transcribe an uploaded file.
Next steps
Ready to try it? The fastest path to value is to record your first session, which only takes a few minutes.