Ten questions to ask before you buy live translation
Ten questions to ask any supplier, us included. What separates them is not the transcription: it is how it comes out, what it does when something fails, how it charges and what it keeps.
- questions to ask
- 10questions to ask
- competitors named
- 0competitors named
- facts to get in writing
- 4facts to get in writing
- to try it yourself
- 1 hto try it yourself
Why a demo cannot decide this for you
Because a demo runs on good audio, a good connection, one language and no audience. The four things that actually break an event. The venue network, a speaker who switches language, the third language somebody asked for the night before, and a ten-second dropout. Do not appear in one. These questions are how you get at them before you sign.
Common mistakes when comparing
- Comparing on the hourly rate without checking for a charge per attendee or per language.
- Assuming "it appears on screen" means the same thing in every system.
- Not asking what happens when the connection drops, which is the only moment you really see a system.
- Accepting "we are GDPR compliant" instead of asking for location, retention period and sub-processors.
The ten questions
Does the output come inside my video signal?
Ask about the mechanism, not the screenshot: NDI with a real alpha channel, or a web page you key?
What does it do when the connection drops?
What must never happen is the last caption freezing on the big screen.
Do you charge per attendee or per language?
Ask it before the hourly price: it decides whether the third language gets approved.
How many languages at once, and who picks?
Ask for both numbers: how many you can choose from, and how many are served at the same time.
Where is it processed and what is kept?
Ask for three things in writing: location, retention period and the sub-processor list.
Does the audience have to install anything?
An app is a barrier that costs you part of the room. A browser is not.
Can it be driven from a physical button?
At a live event, a browser tab is something somebody can close by accident.
What do I have the next morning?
A transcript with real clock times, SRT or VTT, minutes and an audience report. Ask if it is included.
What happens with two or four microphones?
Ask whether the plan changes and whether the minutes tell speakers apart. Guessing and typing are not the same.
Can I try it myself, without a sales call?
If trying it requires booking a call, the other nine answers will take just as long.
How we answer them
It goes in the signal
NDI with a real alpha channel, plus HDMI with a chroma key, a keyable web page and the venue screen on any TV.
It fades to transparent
Never a frozen caption in front of the room, and not at shutdown either.
Neither per attendee nor per language
We bill on-air hours, metered from GO ON AIR to STOP, and the number of microphones in the plan.
58 in the catalogue, 12 at once, chosen by the reader
And they can change language during the event.
Published, not on request
Audio is transcribed in your account’s processing region (Europe, the Americas or Asia-Pacific) and translated by OpenAI in the USA. We store no transcript on the live path: only if you ask for the AI minutes or keep the transcript when closing the app, and it is deleted after 30 days.
A QR code and a browser
No app, no account, no sign-up.
A physical button
A Bitfocus Companion module with a real on-air tally, plus a local TCP and HTTP API.
All of it included on any paid plan
Transcript, SRT and VTT, AI minutes and an audience report per session.
One, two or four microphones by plan
Each speaker’s name is typed by the technician, not guessed by an algorithm.
One free hour, no expiry, no call
Download it and try it on your own rig. The price is published.
What is not on this page
A feature table with names in it
We have not tested theirs. EU comparative-advertising law only protects objectively verifiable comparisons.
That we replace an interpreter every time
We replace the interpretation nobody budgets for. Where it is budgeted there is usually a reason.
Round numbers with no source
Every figure here comes out of the code: 58 languages, 12 at once, 718 ms median from speech to text.
A demo as evidence
Which is why the trial is one hour of real air time, on your rig, with your audio, and it does not expire.
Event Pro
The plan this is nearly always compared on: translation into all 58 languages and two microphones. Accessibility if you only need untranslated captions.
Frequently asked questions
Who do you compare yourselves against?
Against whoever you are comparing. We do not publish tables against named products because we have not tested them, and a claim about somebody else’s product needs a test. What we do publish is how we answer the ten questions, so you can put them to everybody.
Which question do buyers most often forget?
The third: whether there is a charge per attendee or per language. It decides the real cost of the event and almost never shows up in an hourly-rate comparison.
What if I am comparing against a human interpreter, not other software?
Then it is a different comparison. We have a page setting out the four real options (booth, consecutive, automatic, and doing nothing) with what each costs, and a calculator for your specific case.
Can I verify the ten answers?
All ten can be checked inside a one-hour trial with your own audio. That is exactly what it is for.
For your kind of event
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Try one hour free
One hour of captioning and translation on one microphone, no expiry, no card. Enough to prove it on your own rig before you pay.