Translate Zalo voice messages and calls

How to set it up

1. 1
   For voice messages: “Live Listen” with “Screen sound”

   Press Start in Tingdong, then play the voice message in the Zalo app on your Mac. Captions appear as it plays, Vietnamese on top, your language below.

2. 2
   For calls: call from the Zalo Mac app

   Pick “Call Translation” in Tingdong, then choose “Tingdong Microphone” as the microphone in Zalo’s settings. That one choice is the whole setup.

3. 3
   Talk, or only read

   They hear your voice plus a translated voice; you read bilingual captions of everything they say. “Live Listen” alone captions the call without touching your mic.

Vietnamese tones, regional accents and fast speech

Vietnamese carries meaning in tone, and northern, central and southern speech differ enough that a listener from one region slows down for another — which is why short, isolated transcriptions of a voice message go wrong so often. Tingdong translates a continuous stream of speech and keeps context across sentences, and the original Vietnamese line stays on screen above the translation, so a name, a price or an address can be checked against what was actually said. The same route covers the work this app is used for: a long voice message from a supplier or a landlord, a call with a partner in Ho Chi Minh City, a group chat where several people record in a row, and any language switch into English is detected per phrase rather than set in advance.

Frequently asked questions