What are live AI speech translations?
Clevercast lets you deliver live streams with multiple audio languages and closed captions. You can use AI, human interpreters and subtitlers, or a combination of both.
We offer live AI speech translations as a low-cost alternative to multilingual broadcasts and remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI). You can use this to add simultaneous translations to your live stream without any effort, fully automatic. Or you can set an AI vocabulary and make real-time corrections to increase the translation quality.
Our speech translations, like our closed captions, offer superior quality compared to other live AI solutions. Because Clevercast slightly increases the HLS latency of the live stream, it can provide the AI engine with complete sentences to recognize and translate. Language models work much more accurately when they have sufficient context.
Features
- Easy to use: requires no effort to add the extra languages to the live stream and video player.
- Natural sounding voices: the AI voices are clear and almost human.
- Customizable: for each language, you can choose a male or female speaker. For some languages, you can also choose the regional accent.
- Cost-effective: a large number of translations are possible, without having to hire human interpreters for each language.
- Flexible: it is possible to have both human and AI translations for different languages.
- Accessible: live speech translations and multilingual closed captions can be combined.
- Reliable: we use Akamai’s global CDN and adaptive bitrate delivery for flawless HD streaming.
How to use
Configuration is straightforward. Simply add the AI interpreter languages to your live event, and Clevercast will do the rest. When you embed our player, viewers can automatically select these languages.
If you have some time to spare, we recommend creating an AI vocabulary with the key terms for the live stream (names, acronyms, jargon). The setup is easy and can be updated before and during the live stream. You can export vocabularies and reuse them in other live streams.
To improve accuracy, you can have someone make real-time corrections to the speech-to-text transcription, which is the source of the AI translations. Clevercast immediately adds such corrections to the AI vocabulary, so each term only needs to be corrected once. Alternatively, you may also consider hiring professional correctors.
When to use
Budget considerations often influence the decision to use live AI speech translations. For example, if there isn’t enough budget to hire human interpreters for all languages, or if the live stream is so lengthy that hiring human interpreters becomes very expensive. Therefore, AI simultaneous interpretation is gaining ground.
There are numerous other reasons: e.g. if a large number of languages is required, this greatly simplifies the streaming setup. Considerations such as environmental friendliness, availability of interpreters and technicality of events can also play a role. AI speech translations are also frequently used to enhance live streams with multilingual closed captions. If closed captions are already available for a language, speech translations can be added at no additional cost.
Finally, for many types of live streams, the quality of AI translations is comparable of better to that of remote interpretation.
Live AI speech translations vs. closed captions
In our view, AI is always the way to go for live (multilingual) closed captions with high quality and accuracy (with or without human correction in real-time). The quality of live AI audio translations via Clevercast is also very good, thanks to the extra context we send to the AI models and our smart pre- and post-processing. But there are additional challenges, given that speech translation needs to take into account factors such as sentence segmentation, fluency and intonation. Thanks to its unique approach, Clevercast – unlike its competition – has managed to overcome these challenges.
For live streams consisting of speeches, AI audio translation generally performs very well, as people use well-structured and delineated sentences. However, for live streams with different people talking interchangeably, accuracy may be slightly less than the 99%+ accuracy for closed captions. However, you can improve AI translation for these kind of events by having a real-time corrector ensure that sentences in the translation source have a good structure. Also keep in mind that AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, so we expect the AI audio quality to get better for all types of events in the (near) future.
Live AI speech translations vs. remote simultaneous interpretation by humans
As mentioned, your budget and the type of event are the main reasons for (not) choosing AI audio translations. The number of languages and the duration of the stream also play a role. If you only need one or a few languages for a limited duration, Remote Simultaneous Interpretation (RSI) may also be a good choice. Contact us for more information, or ask for a free trial account to test the different options.