AI Simultaneous Interpretation

AI simultaneous interpretation is real-time spoken translation produced by software rather than by a human interpreter. The system listens to the speaker's live microphone feed, transcribes it, translates it, and speaks the result in the target language — continuously, while the speaker is still talking. The audience hears a synthetic voice on their own language channel, exactly where a human interpreter's voice would otherwise be.

We take a clean audio feed from the venue's sound desk — the same feed a human interpreter would receive in a booth — and route it into the AI interpreting engine. The engine returns one translated audio stream per language, and we patch those streams back into the interpretation transmitter as separate channels. From the audience's point of view nothing has changed: they pick up a receiver, select their language, and listen.

Yes, and this is the part most AI interpreting offers get wrong. Almost every AI interpretation platform on the market asks each attendee to install an app and listen on their own phone. We do the opposite: the AI output goes into the same IR or RF transmitter that carries human interpretation, so your audience uses the standard receivers and earphones we deliver to the venue. No app, no QR code, no personal device, no attendee left out.

Not in every situation, and we would rather say so up front. On clear, prepared, single-speaker content — keynotes, technical presentations, product and training sessions — modern engines are genuinely strong, and with your terminology loaded in advance they handle domain vocabulary well. They lose ground on heavy accents, crosstalk, idiom, humour, deliberate ambiguity and unstructured debate, where a human interpreter reads intent rather than words. Choose the tool to match the session.

Avoid it where the interpreted words carry legal or contractual weight: court and arbitration proceedings, regulated medical consent, notarised signings, collective bargaining, and diplomatic negotiation. We also recommend a human interpreter for sessions built on unscripted debate, for high-stakes investor or board communication, and anywhere a mistranslation would be expensive to walk back. For those, see our simultaneous interpretation service.

Many more than a booth setup allows. Each additional human language pair means another booth, another pair of interpreters and another slice of floor space, so most events stop at two or three. An AI engine produces additional language streams in parallel at a marginal cost, so ten or more simultaneous languages is practical. The real limit becomes the channel count of the transmitter in the room, which reaches 32 on the digital systems we deploy.

A few seconds. The engine has to hear enough of a sentence to transcribe it, translate it and speak it, so the translated audio trails the speaker by noticeably more than a human interpreter would. Audiences adapt to it within a few minutes. It matters most in fast question-and-answer exchanges, which is one reason we often put humans on the discussion sessions and AI on the presentation sessions.

The engine itself runs on a network connection, so yes — we need a stable, dedicated line for the processing path. The critical difference from phone-based AI platforms is that your audience does not. Only our rack needs connectivity; the translated audio reaches the room over IR or RF, which does not care about venue Wi-Fi. We bring a redundant connection and test the path during setup.

Usually, and the gap widens with every language you add. A human setup is priced per language pair — two interpreters plus a booth for each — while AI pricing is driven mainly by session hours and the number of output languages, with no booth and no interpreter day rates. The equipment side is unchanged: you still need the transmitter, the receivers and a technician. The saving is in the booths and the interpreter fees, not in the hardware.

Yes, and for multi-track programmes it is usually the best answer. We run human interpreters on the plenary hall and the sessions that carry commercial or legal weight, and AI on the breakout rooms, the workshops and the long-tail languages that could never justify a booth of their own. It is the same transmitter and the same receivers throughout, so delegates simply change channel.

Turkish is well supported by current engines, both as a source and as a target language, and quality on prepared conference content is good. Turkish does make the delay more noticeable than it is in English: the verb usually arrives at the end of the sentence, so the engine has to wait for more of the utterance before it can commit to a translation. We account for that when we plan which sessions get AI.

Audio leaves the room to be processed, and that has to be part of your decision. Before the event we confirm where processing happens, what retention applies, and whether the session audio and transcripts are deleted afterwards, and we can put that in writing alongside a confidentiality undertaking. For content that cannot leave the building under any circumstances, a human interpreter in a booth remains the correct choice.

Yes. The same engine produces a live text stream, so we can put translated subtitles on the hall screens, on a side screen, or on a web view delegates open on their own device. Captions are also the accessible option for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they give you a usable transcript of the session afterwards.

A clean audio feed from the sound desk, the language list, and the running order. Send us speaker names, presentation decks, acronyms, brand names and technical terminology in advance and we load them into the engine as a custom glossary — this is the single biggest lever on output quality. We handle the rest: the processing rack, the channel mapping, the transmitter, the receivers and an on-site technician.

One to two weeks is comfortable for a standard programme, which is far less lead time than human interpretation requires, since there are no interpreter diaries to match. Allow longer if you want a substantial custom glossary built, if the programme is multi-track, or if you need a venue survey for receiver coverage.