AI solving a real problem in my life — a family chat translator

We have a family WhatsApp group with my parents, me, and my wife Fatma. My parents are Polish. Fatma is Egyptian, speaks fluent English, but no Polish. My parents speak Polish and lean on me for everything else.

For months, Fatma’s routine was the same: screenshot a Polish message, paste it into Google Translate, read the result, then type her reply in English. Every single message. Sometimes she’d just give up and wait for me to summarize later.

At some point I got tired of being the relay and decided to fix it.

I didn’t want to move everyone to a new app and I wanted to check how good all those AI coding tools are. So the decision was simple - Nobody was going to install anything. WhatsApp is where the photos live, the group already exists, and people actually check it. So I went online and bought my claude code subscription and not so long after a translation bot was created that sits in the group, watches messages come in, and posts the translation in whatever language the other side reads.

What it does

The bot sits in the WhatsApp group and watches every message. If someone writes in Polish, it posts the English translation. If someone writes in English, it posts the Polish translation. That’s it.

Each translation shows up as sender/time: translated message, so people can see who said what without scrolling back.

How it actually went

First real test was in our “Family” group. My dad wrote something in Polish about fixing the garden fence. A second later, my wife saw the English version and replied about shipping materials from Cairo. My mum read the Polish translation and added a photo.

I just sat there watching. Didn’t type a thing.

Now it runs every day. Birthday planning happens without me in the middle. My parents can follow my brother-in-law’s 2 AM English jokes. If something arrives in a language the bot doesn’t handle, it stays quiet.

The part that surprised me

How easy it was. I knew nothing about the WhatsApp protocol. I had no idea how to hook into it, how to deploy a bot, or how any of that plumbing worked. A couple of hours later I had a working solution running in the family group, solving a problem that had been annoying us for months.

That’s the thing that stuck with me. Not the translation quality or the speed, but the fact that I went from “I wonder if I could…” to “it’s done and my family is using it” in an afternoon. A real problem, fixed with tools that didn’t exist a year ago.

What I want to add

Arabic support is the obvious next step, so my wife’s parents can join the group too. I’d also like the bot to handle emoji context better and maybe generate thread summaries when a photo kicks off a long back-and-forth.

For now though, it does what I needed. I stopped being the translator in my own family group, and somehow the conversations got longer instead of shorter.

If you want to set this up for your own family, the code is open source: WhatsApp Translator.