WIT is an AI communication check for founders and global teams. Paste an email, Slack message or product copy to see how it may land across American, Indian and Singapore English, understand why and get a clearer alternative without losing your voice. Before you hit send, see if your message travels.
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WIT
Hi! I am Maria, one of the makers behind WIT - Will It Travel?
Working in international teams, I’ve often anxiously reread a message several times before sending it, wondering whether it might sound rude, unclear or mean something different to the person receiving it.
That experience inspired WIT.
Paste a Slack message or email and WIT explores how it may be understood across American, Indian and Singapore English. It highlights potential misunderstandings, explains where they may come from and suggests clearer wording for an international audience.
WIT doesn’t rank one variety of English above another or automatically replace your writing. It gives you the reasoning and an alternative, then you decide what to keep.
We built this early version as Team Oranges & Lemons, an international team working together across countries and time zones. We’re launching early because we want real feedback before deciding how to make it better next.
Please try it with and tell us what worked or what didn’t. We would especially love to know:
Did WIT find something genuinely useful?
Did anything feel wrong or confusing?
Did the suggestion preserve what you intended to say?
Before you hit send, see if your message travels✈️
PicWish
@maria_telegina how the descriptive parity approach compared to grammarly just forcing us english on everything? really like it gives the reasoning for sg/in readers instead of just auto replacing text.
WIT
@mohsinproduct Thank you for this point! This is exactly the distinction we wanted to make.
WIT presents different interpretations side by side and explains where possible misunderstandings come from. It gives the user an opportunity to decide whether anything actually needs to change for their original message, and to learn more about other Englishes if they are interested.
WIT
@maria_telegina @mohsinproduct That is a good point, we don't want to replace anyone's voice, or just be a "grammar checker", it is more on sending a message with the meaning you want. WIT gives reasoning to phrasing that might be misinterpreted across the world, even when locally you would understand. And you don't have to use the exact rewrite that WIT provides, but can use the tips it gives in the report to edit your draft message in the ways that YOU want.
Have you tried any examples in the website that you thought were "off", and did you get the results you expected? What's a phrase you think many people have confusion with?
Softorino 💻📲
My copy goes out to a dozen countries at once, and I only spot the confusing line when someone asks what I meant. Which phrase trips people up most?
WIT
@yelyzaveta_kibets There are a lot of possible phrases depending on what variety of English you are speaking. A very common one is: "Please do the needful" or "Can we prepone the meeting", or even "Can you do this ASAP?". These all cause some friction in the workplace, where people from different cultures may misunderstand a certain phrase.
That's where we saw, and heard from others, that a tool like WIT can be useful for providing the possible places of misunderstanding, BEFORE it goes out to everyone. If there's a point of confusion, then WIT helps you understand what audiences might not interpret it how you mean.
In your case, when your messages go out to so many people, getting feedback before you send the message could prevent a lot of issues.
Have you tried WIT? Try a message you have gotten mixed responses on and see if it could help you tweak your message in the future. Please let me know what phrases you try, and if the report or rewrite is helpful!!
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
Interesting idea. Currently testing it and would like to see more languages :)
WIT
@busmark_w_nika Thank you for your support and for taking the time to test our product out! As a team we would also love to see WIT expand to more Englishes and other languages. Are there any languages you would most like to see next?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@maria_telegina I think the focus should go to languages that are widely used and have good economic background: German, let's say also Spanish.
WIT
@busmark_w_nika Yes, thanks a lot! My German-speaking friends who tested the product also said that they would like something similar for German.
Spanish represented across so many different locations and has so much variation - makes perfect sense. And some of the feedback we received also suggested Arabic. Expanding beyond English could be an ambitious, but natural future direction for WIT
WIT
Hi!
Communication in international spaces can be hard, and can lead to a lot of misunderstandings among colleagues. That's where WIT comes in, send your possibly unclear message and see how it might be interpreted by other English speakers.
Meet WIT — Will It Travel?
WIT is a language risk audit tool that explores how a message might be interpreted across different varieties of English. For our first version, we’re looking at American, Indian, and Singapore English.
The goal isn’t to decide which version of English is “correct.” Instead, WIT helps make potential differences in interpretation visible, things like wording, tone, or phrases that might make sense to one audience but create confusion for another.
This idea is especially meaningful to me because I’ve experienced those misunderstandings myself when communicating with international friends and collaborators. Sometimes a message can seem completely clear to you and still land very differently for someone else.
We’re excited to be launching today on Product Hunt, it has been a wonderful journey so far!
What’s a phrase or message you’ve sent that you later realized could have been interpreted completely differently?
@maria_telegina Congrats on the launch! Very interesting idea, because communication is a key to success and soo important to take into account other cultural backgrounds!
WIT
@senkina Thank you so much! Exactly, the main mission of this product is to help people with different cultural background to understand each other better.
Dial
the use case i'd want is the reverse direction - pasting a message someone else sent me that landed weird, to check if it's actually a tone mismatch across Englishes or if i'm just reading into it. is that a use case you've thought about, or is it strictly for checking your own outgoing message before you hit send
WIT
@galdayan Thank you,this is brilliant! We have mainly been thinking about WIT as something you do use before sending yourself, but the reverse direction is so natural and makes so much sense as well.
Though the current framing is around working on your own message, technically, you can already paste in a message you received.
A separate 'help me understand the tone and language of this message' mode could be really powerful addition. But we will have to think how to go about not claiming that we know what exactly the sender intended. But we could show whether a mismatch across Englishes is possible problem in communication.
Thanks! We are definitely adding this to our list.
Dial
@maria_telegina makes sense, and the not-claiming-sender-intent caution is the right instinct. maybe frame it as a pattern match instead of a verdict, like this phrasing reads differently across Englishes rather than they meant X. keeps you out of the business of guessing intent while still flagging the mismatch
WIT
@galdayan Thank you for your feedback and for suggesting the framing as well! Hope you don't mind the shoutout
Dial
@maria_telegina not at all, happy to help. good luck with the receive-side mode, that's the more interesting half of the problem imo
Not auto-replacing is the right call. Most tools go straight to the rewrite and you lose any way to argue with it. The thing I'd watch is false positives, because if it flags a sentence that was actually fine, people stop reading the flags inside a week and you never hear about it. Nobody files a bug for a tool they've quietly started ignoring. Three Englishes is a curious cut too, British was the one I expected to see first.
WIT
@asadmalik901 Thank you for your comment.
Brilliant point - false positives might be more damaging for trust than missed risks. The three Englishes were a scope decision for this first prototype.
British English is an obvious next addition. What other varieties would you expect to see early on?
@maria_telegina Nigerian English, and not for the reason people assume. Business writing there runs a lot more formal than American, so copy that reads neutral to a US team reads brusque, and that's a misunderstanding you'd never catch by checking vocabulary. Irish is worth it too if founders are selling into EU teams. The bigger question is whether you're modelling countries or contexts, because two engineers on Slack in Lagos and San Francisco write more like each other than either writes a local business email.
WIT
@asadmalik901 Thank you for all the insights! We really appreciate your feedback and time.
I agree that local Englishes can represent very different cultural and communicative traditions and conventions. There is a gap between Nigerian English / US English in expected levels of formality and politeness.
The question of modelling contexts and countries - we started with country-linked varieties and a limited number of the contexts because they gave us a manageable scope for this very first prototype, but type of communication, e.g. Slack vs email, and relationships between people, e.g. hierarchy, may be very important extensions of the concept of WIT. Your example of engineers in Lagos and San Francisco captures that!
Perhaps we should try to let the user provide more context rather than assume that country alone explains how a message is understood?
@maria_telegina I'd be careful about asking for context up front. Every field you add before the check is a reason to close the tab, and the people who most need WIT are the ones in a hurry. Infer what you can from the message itself, a Slack line and a formal email don't look alike, and only ask when the guess actually changes the answer. Country as a default the user can correct after seeing the result costs a lot less than a form before it.
WIT
@asadmalik901 That’s true and fair, and it is an important product point. I only thought about that context could improve the analysis, but not enough about the cost of asking for it and the users perspective.
Only asking a follow-up question when the missing context would really change the result sounds like a much better flow. For other cases, maybe some not annoying optional 'feedback' button or a simple 'like/dislike'.
Thank you!