Live translation for meetings

You have two choices, translated captions that people read or spoken translation that they hear. Most big tools sell captions on paid plans, and all of them lag a few seconds.

By RespireSoft. Published 31 October 2026. Prices and product status checked 31 October 2026. 7 min read.

To run a meeting where people speak different languages, you turn on live translation in the tool and each person picks the language they want. There are two kinds. Translated captions show text in your language at the bottom of the screen. Spoken translation plays a voice in your language. Captions are common. Spoken translation is newer and rarer.

Neither is perfect. Both lag the speaker by a few seconds, and both make mistakes with names, noise and several people talking at once. This post explains how to set up a meeting, what Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams offer according to their own pages, and where RespireSoft Meet fits. Everything about plans and languages was checked on 31 October 2026. Vendors change these quickly, so read the linked page before you commit.

Captions or a voice#

Pick by who is in the room.

Captions suit people who read comfortably, meetings with technical words, and anyone who needs a transcript. They are also quiet, so they work in an office.
Spoken translation suits people who cannot read fast, who are driving or walking, or who simply want to listen. It sounds more natural for a long talk and is harder to get right.

You can use both. A listener can read captions in one language while another listener hears a voice in a different one.

How to set up a multilingual meeting#

These steps work in any tool.

Choose the languages first. Count how many languages you really need. Each extra language costs money in most tools, and some cap them.
Turn it on before the meeting. In Zoom and Teams a host or an admin has to enable it. Do not find that out five minutes before.
Tell each speaker to set their speaking language. Zoom says speakers must confirm their language, otherwise others receive wrong captions. Teams says the same, and asks the organizer to set the meeting's spoken language.
Speak in short sentences, one person at a time. Both Teams and Google warn that accuracy drops with overlapping speakers, noise and distance from the microphone.
Use a headset. A good microphone helps more than any setting.
Do a two minute test with a real speaker of each language. Names and jargon are where it fails first.
Keep a human option for important events. For legal, medical or formal meetings, a professional interpreter is still the safer choice. Teams itself points to CART captioners for human captions.

Zoom#

Zoom's translated captions page says the feature is included in Zoom Workplace Business Plus, Premier, Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Plus. For other paid plans it is an add-on at $5 a month per user. It shows captions in 35 languages, according to that page. Zoom's newer AI Companion pages cite a higher language count, so the number may have grown and we could not confirm a current figure on one page.

How it works: the host enables it, each speaker sets the language they speak, and each participant picks the caption language. Translated captions do not appear in the recording itself, but they do appear in the full transcript.

Zoom's free plan is a different matter. See free video conferencing with no sign up for those limits. Translation is a paid feature on Zoom.

Google Meet#

Google has two features, and they are easy to confuse.

Translated captions. Google's help page lists 69 languages you can translate to or from. It is available on Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus and Google AI Pro for Education. Some languages are still rolling out, and some are in beta, so quality varies. The page does not mention free or personal accounts.

Speech translation. This is a voice feature. Meet translates what a person says in real time "in a voice like yours". Google lists 55 languages. In a scheduled meeting the host needs an eligible plan, and in a direct call at least one person does. Eligible plans include Google AI Pro, Google AI Ultra and several Workspace editions. Meetings are limited to 90 minutes on most plans, and 8 hours on Google AI Ultra and AI Expanded Access.

Google is also direct about quality. Translations are delayed by a few seconds, and it warns of grammar errors, unintelligible words, unexpected accents, wrong noun genders and changes in voice style, especially when several people talk. It does not work in live streams or recordings, and Google says no audio is saved and models are not trained on your voice.

If you want spoken translation and your whole group already uses Google plans, this is the strongest big-vendor option we found.

Microsoft Teams#

Teams has live captions in meetings, started from More actions and then Captions. Microsoft's page says live translated captions require a Teams Premium or a Microsoft Copilot add-on license. If the organizer has one, all participants can use translated captions. If only some participants have one, only they see the Translate to option. Translation covers about 30 languages.

For town halls and live events, organizers pick translation languages in advance, up to six, or up to ten with Premium, and an attendee can view captions in only one of those.

Teams does not save captions. For a transcript you must turn on transcription. Microsoft also says it can restrict the services to limit excessive use or fraud, and admins can switch captions off. We found captions and text on the page, not a spoken voice translation for ordinary meetings.

Other tools#

Many other products add translation, usually as captions. Because we could not check each vendor page for this post, we do not list their prices or languages. If you use one, look for three things on its own page.

Is translation text, voice, or both?
Which plan includes it, and is it per host or per attendee?
How many languages, and does the list cover the pairs you need?

If your need is "talk to one person who speaks another language", a free tool can be enough. See the free live interpreter and live captions from RespireSoft Meet, or the comparison in Google Meet, Zoom and Teams compared.

RespireSoft Meet#

RespireSoft Meet does captions and spoken translation, and it is also an API you can put into your own product. Here is what it does today, and what it does not.

Spoken interpreter. A listener picks a language and hears the speaker in it a few seconds later. The call screen shows captions in the chosen language too.
Free interpreter tool. The live interpreter needs no account for your first free minutes of the day. It supports five languages today, English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Persian, and a room of up to 4 people. It is a small tool, not a conference product.
In the API. Translation languages for a room are English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Turkish and Urdu. A room can use at most 5 of them at once. That is a short list next to Google's 55 or 69 languages, and you should count it as a real limit.
Interface languages. The call screen itself comes in 18 languages. That is separate from translation languages, which are chosen per room.
Price. Public prices are $0.004 per caption minute and $0.012 per listener minute of spoken translation, and the first 20,000 participant minutes a month are free. Billing is off, so you are not charged yet, and these prices may change. See pricing.
Limits. Captions come from speech recognition, so names, noise and accents cost accuracy. Spoken translation is not instant. A listener hears each sentence a few seconds after the speaker, because the meaning has to take shape before it can be translated and spoken. We publish no accuracy score, and we have not compared quality with Google's or Zoom's.

Where we are the better fit: you want to put translation in your own app or site with one API, pay per minute, and you can live with the languages above. Where the large vendors win: they cover many more languages, and your people are already inside Zoom, Meet or Teams.

For the developer side, see the captions and translation guide and how to add live captions to a meeting.

What to expect from the delay#

Every tool in this post lags. Translation needs a full thought before it can be said again in another language, so a few seconds is normal, and word order differences can stretch it. For captions the delay is shorter than for voice, because there is nothing to speak.

Practical advice for speakers: pause between sentences, avoid idioms, and spell out names once. For listeners: keep captions on even when listening to a voice, so you can check a number or a name.

Questions people ask#

Is there free live translation for meetings? Zoom, Google and Teams sell translation on paid plans or add-ons, according to their pages. A free option is small tools such as ours, with short sessions and few languages.

Is machine translation accurate enough? For everyday meetings it is useful. For legal, medical or contract talks, use a human interpreter. Every vendor above warns about errors.

Does it work in the recording? Not always. Zoom's translated captions do not appear in the recording itself, only in the transcript, and Google's speech translation does not work in recordings.

Can I translate a meeting afterwards? Several tools produce a transcript. Ours can be downloaded with translations where a line has one.