2026 | Professional

French Design Awards Silver Winner

Sotto — Cultural Communication Companion

Entrant

Yijing Han (Individual)

Category

User Experience (UX) Design - Work & Productivity

Client's Name

Country / Region

United States

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.

Credits

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