tonGues is a language-exchange messenger. You chat the way you normally would, and the app translates and transcribes messages in the background — so you and someone who speaks a different language can keep a real conversation going.

This is a quick tour of what it does and how it’s built.

What “language exchange” means here

Most messengers assume everyone shares a language. A language-exchange app flips that assumption: the point is that you don’t share one. You write in your own language, the other person reads it in theirs, and the original is always one tap away.

What it does

  • 💬 Real-time chat — one-to-one and group conversations over WebSockets.
  • 🎙️ Voice and video calls — with background ringing and call notifications.
  • 📷 Rich messages — photos, voice notes, video, and files.
  • 🔤 Live translation — read incoming messages in your own language.
  • 📝 Transcription — turn voice messages into searchable text.
  • ✏️ The usual messenger toolkit — edit, react, reply, forward, pin, search, plus friends and presence statuses.
  • 🖥️ Everywhere — Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux from one Flutter codebase.

How it’s built

  • Client: Flutter (Dart) — a single codebase for mobile and desktop.
  • Backend: FastAPI + PostgreSQL, with Redis for realtime and presence, object storage for media, and small AI services for speech and translation.
  • Realtime: a WebSocket layer that fans messages out and degrades gracefully when a connection blips.

Why we’re building in public

Building a messenger is mostly about the unglamorous parts — reconnects, delivery guarantees, media uploads that survive a flaky network. We write those up, one change at a time, on our blog and on dev.to.

If that’s your kind of thing, follow along. 👋

— the tonGues team