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NY Product Design AwardsEnter Award

Interface & User Experience

Sotto — Cultural Communication Companion

Entrant: Yijing Han (Individual)

2026 Silver winner badge
2026

Silver

CategoryInterface & User Experience
Class / SubcategoryUser Experience (UX)
AI-Personalized UX
Country / RegionUnited States

The project

Project description.

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Sotto is a multi-modal AI companion that helps non-native English speakers find their voice in global workplace meetings. It does not translate their words. It reads the room.

In every cross-cultural meeting, there is a moment when someone almost speaks, and then doesn't. It lasts one to two seconds. That window is where translation, cultural register, and turn-taking collide. Four hundred million capable professionals carry this silent second every day across technology, healthcare, law, and consulting.

Today's tools translate words. None of them read the room.

Sotto is a cultural communication companion. It is calibrated to the user's origin, role, and the register of the meeting. Through voice, visual cues, and a personalized avatar, it surfaces one suggested phrasing at exactly the moment the user needs it. Not raw translation. The right thing to say, with cultural precision.

The product spans five surfaces. A pre-meeting Brief prepares the user for the room. Live Whispers arrive the moment they are needed. A Debrief turns each meeting into measurable growth. Ambient companions live inside Slack and email, where work actually happens.

The design conviction behind Sotto is simple. The cost of cross-cultural communication is not vocabulary. It is the room. By giving professionals the right phrasing, in the right register, at the right second, the product turns one of the most invisible workplace inequities into a moment of presence and confidence.

Read the room, not the language.

Your work belongs in the conversation.

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