Viber built a home for 1 billion non-English speakers. Babel opens a door to the rest of the world — so the conversations that happen inside Viber can reach everyone outside it, automatically, in 100+ languages.
| Feature | Viber | Babel |
|---|---|---|
| Free international calls | ✓ HD voice + video |
✓ With live audio translation |
| Automatic message translation | ✕ Manual translate button only |
✓ Both directions, automatic |
| Public communities | Partial Invite-link only, one language |
✓ Open, discoverable, multilingual |
| Reach beyond your contacts | ✕ Private network only |
✓ Global social feed, 100+ languages |
| Expressive stickers & media | ✓ Large sticker marketplace |
✓ Rich media, voice notes, video |
| End-to-end encryption | ✓ All messages & calls |
✓ Private messages |
| Disappearing messages | ✓ Secret chats |
Planned |
| Cross-language discoverability | ✕ Only within same-language groups |
✓ Discover across all languages |
| Voice translation in calls | ✕ | ✓ Your voice, their language |
| Phone number required | Required | Not required |
Viber is a private network. The 1 billion people on it are connected to the people they already know — family members in other countries, friends from the neighborhood, colleagues they've met. That's exactly what it's designed for, and it does it well. But that design has a ceiling: your reach is bounded by your contacts list, and your contacts list is bounded by language. A Greek speaker's Viber network is almost entirely Greek. A Ukrainian's is almost entirely Ukrainian. The connections are real but the universe is small.
Babel's universe is the entire planet. When you post in Ukrainian, it arrives in Arabic, Filipino, Greek, Spanish, and 96 other languages simultaneously. When you join a community, you're not joining a language silo — you're joining a topic, and everyone who cares about that topic can participate regardless of what they speak. The 1 billion people on Viber have conversations that the remaining 7 billion never hear. Babel is what changes that.
For most users in Viber-dominant markets, this isn't a choice between apps — it's a question of what you want to do. Keep a family group chat in Viber. Keep the encrypted conversations with people you trust in Viber. Then use Babel for everything that deserves a global audience: the opinion you want to share, the community you want to build, the conversation that shouldn't be limited to the people who already speak your language. The two apps solve different problems and work better together than either does alone.
Babel is built for the markets Viber calls home. Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia — your languages are first-class here.
Free forever for the first million members. No credit card.
No — and understanding why reveals what Babel actually does. Viber is exceptional at what it is: free international calling, end-to-end encrypted messaging, disappearing messages, expressive stickers. Hundreds of millions of people use it to stay connected with family across borders and with friends in communities where Viber is the default messenger. Babel isn't competing with that. Babel is a social network — a place to publish, discover, and have conversations with people you haven't met yet, across language communities you've never had access to. Viber keeps you connected to the people you already know. Babel introduces you to the ones you don't.
Viber's 1 billion users are concentrated in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia — communities that are already multilingual by necessity. A Ukrainian speaker knows what it costs to communicate in a second language. A Filipino professional who code-switches between Filipino, English, and a regional dialect understands linguistic friction better than most. These are the exact people Babel is built for: not people who need to be convinced that language barriers exist, but people who have lived with them and are ready for a social network where those barriers disappear. Babel gives Viber users a public voice — posts, communities, and conversations that reach the whole world in every reader's language, not just the people on their contacts list.
Viber Communities can host unlimited members and feel like a group chat that scales — they're excellent for coordinating existing groups (neighborhood associations, fan clubs, local businesses). But they're closed: you find a Community through an invite link, and the conversation is limited to the language the Community happens to use. A Greek Viber Community speaks Greek. A Lebanese Community speaks Arabic. They never talk to each other. Babel's equivalent — open communities with automatic translation — means a Greek community and an Arabic community about the same topic can exist in the same space, each reading in their language, each contributing in theirs. The communities become genuinely global rather than language-local.
Viber has excellent free HD calling — one of the main reasons it dominates in markets where international calling costs are high. Babel includes voice and video calls with live audio translation: you speak in your language, your caller hears in theirs, in your voice and tone. For users in Viber-dominant markets calling family in other countries, this means a call between a Bulgarian speaker in Sofia and a relative in Germany actually happens in Bulgarian and German simultaneously — no switching, no simplifying your vocabulary, no communication tax. The call becomes what a call should always have been: two people talking, without a language in the middle.
Yes — Babel is specifically designed for the regions where Viber is strongest. Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Greece), the Middle East (Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Jordan), and Southeast Asia (Philippines, Myanmar) are all first-class markets for Babel, not afterthoughts. The languages spoken in these regions — Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Arabic, Filipino, Burmese — are all supported natively. Babel's waitlist prioritizes early access for users in high-linguistic-diversity regions precisely because those communities have the most to gain from automatic translation infrastructure.
Ready? Join the waitlist — free forever
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