Kotoba CEO: Language Barriers in Business Will Be Gone by 2026

Kotoba Technologies CEO Hiroyuki Kojima demonstrated his company’s voice AI simultaneous interpretation and declared with 100% confidence that language barriers in business will disappear within 2026.

• Founded July 2023, offices in San Francisco and Otemachi; 15 full-time staff producing the output of 50–100 people through AI
• Voice-to-voice simultaneous interpretation with roughly 2–3 second latency, claimed to match professional human interpreters
• Translation accuracy improved 1.5x over the past month; already surpassing human performance in select domains
• VIP speakers’ past talk videos can be fed into context 30 seconds before they go on stage for personalized interpretation
• Two business lines: consumer/enterprise app (enterprise plan launching this month) and model licensing to large corporations
• Policy pitch to PM Takaichi: send top talent to the US and China; distribute subsidies broadly to promote competition rather than picking winners
• “Letting the government pick winners with subsidies is the worst outcome — if companies die in open competition, so be it”

2026-04-11 · Watch on YouTube

Japanese page: Kotoba CEO断言：2026年に言語の壁は消える