The transcription stack that runs where your data has to stay.
Makimoto Kawa is an MIT-licensed transcription pipeline with managed APIs for real-time and post-call workloads. Hosted in Singapore from 1 July 2026, with country-specific deployments and a self-hostable release to follow.
What is Kawa?
Kawa is a transcription pipeline with two managed APIs at launch: one for real-time use cases like live captioning and voice agents, one for post-call workloads like recorded calls and batch analytics. Both run the same five-stage pipeline: audio resampling, voice activity detection with speaker diarisation, noise filtering, speech-to-text, and post-processing. The orchestration layer is open source. Each component is replaceable.
Why Makimoto?
A pipeline you can actually read
The Kawa orchestration layer is published on GitHub under the MIT licence at launch (01 July 2026). Read the source, file issues, fork it, contribute back. Internal pipeline components open progressively through 2026 and 2027, with no source-available carve-outs and no Business Source License surprises.
Your data stays where you deploy
Customer audio and transcripts are processed in country, not just stored there. Kawa's first release runs exclusively in Singapore. Country-specific deployments and a self-hostable container release follow, for jurisdictions where data residency is non-negotiable.
Modular by design
Voice activity detection, diarisation, noise handling, the speech-to-text model, post-processing — each stage is replaceable. Tune for your language, your domain, or your latency budget. Composability is the architecture, not a feature.
Get on the waitlist for Kawa early access
We are onboarding waitlist members in order of registration ahead of the 1 July launch. Tell us about your use case in step 2 of the form, and we will prioritise developers building open-source projects, regulated-sector applications, or APAC-language tooling.