Breaking Language Barriers with Audio Transcription & Translation — AIKKA

Introduction

In surveys, the human voice carries more than words — it carries emotion, tone, and truth. With Aikka, ToyStack wanted to capture all of that. Traditional survey tools reduce answers to dry text boxes. But real feedback, especially from diverse communities, often comes best through speech.

To make that possible, Aikka now lets respondents record voice answers, which are instantly transcribed, translated, and analyzed for sentiment. The magic happens through an intelligent transcription engine that not only understands spoken words but also detects nuances like confidence, hesitation, or frustration.

Behind the scenes, ToyStack built a real-time processing layer that converts these audio clips into text, runs emotional analysis, and groups respondents by tone and sentiment. The result: administrators get richer insights — not just what people said, but how they felt saying it.

How We Built It

Toystack engineered this feature using AWS Transcribe for speech-to-text and AWS Translate for multi-language translation, layered with our proprietary contextual AI engine. This AI layer refines raw transcripts by identifying contextual markers — idioms, sarcasm, and emotional tone — that standard models often miss. The data then flows through an event-driven pipeline that asynchronously handles transcription, translation, and sentiment tagging. The result is a seamless, scalable system that transforms hours of recorded feedback into structured insights within minutes.

This feature didn't just improve survey accuracy; it gave organizations a deeper understanding of their audiences. Because sometimes, the story behind the voice matters more than the words themselves.