Our mission
Medicine asks you to describe a feeling you do not have words for in your first language. Then it asks you to do it again, precisely, under fluorescent light, while you are frightened.
Keiro exists so that being understood does not depend on which language you happen to speak.
The gap, in figures.
These are not marketing numbers. They are the reason the project exists.
- 0M
- people in the USspeak a language other than English at home. Roughly one in five.
- 0
- languages Kai speaksa real conversation in each, not a translated menu.
- 0
- dollars, for patientsfree permanently. The moment you need a card, we have rebuilt the barrier.
- 0
- accounts requiredno email, no password, no confirmation link before you can speak.
The gap is not between languages. It is between what a person can feel and what they are able to say to the one person who could help.
What we are actually building.
Keiro is not trying to replace your doctor, and it is not trying to be a hospital system’s software.
It is a companion for the twenty minutes before the visit, the part where you sit in a waiting room and rehearse.
You talk to Kai in the language you think in. Kai listens, asks the follow-up questions a good nurse would ask, and writes it down in clear English for the person about to treat you. That is the whole product, and we have been deliberate about not adding more.
Hola, soy Kai. Cuéntame qué te duele, con tus propias palabras.
Me duele el pecho cuando subo las escaleras. Empezó hace tres días.
Gracias. ¿El dolor se va cuando descansas?
Kai asks a follow-up. A translation app would have translated the sentence and stopped.
The rules we gave ourselves.
Some of these cost us things. We are keeping them anyway.
- Free for patients, permanently. The moment a person reaches for a card to explain their symptoms, we have rebuilt the barrier we set out to remove.
- No account before you can speak. Asking someone to register before they may say where it hurts is a small cruelty dressed up as onboarding.
- Kai never diagnoses. Not once, not carefully, not with a disclaimer. Kai helps you say what you feel; your doctor decides what it means.
- Nothing you say gets sold. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to insurers. See privacy & safety.
- We build for the person least comfortable using it: older, on a cheap phone, nervous. If it does not work for her, it does not work.
- We say what we have not done. No clinical review, no validation study, no certification, all stated plainly rather than discovered in diligence.
More on the last two in accessibility and privacy & safety.