The service, in the language of whoever is listening
The priest speaks as he always does. Anyone who does not have the language opens a link on their phone, picks theirs, and hears it a few seconds later.
This is where it has been running longest, and where the figures quoted on the rest of this site come from. A parish with tourists or with parishioners from abroad has a very specific problem: the service cannot be paused, cannot be repeated in another language, and there is no budget for an interpreter every Sunday.
Where the audio comes from
From the mixing desk the parish already has. The lectern microphone and the lapel one are already plugged into it; what gets added is an auxiliary output to a small box in the sacristy that sends that audio out encrypted. The PA is not touched, the microphones do not change, and the church sounds exactly the same to anybody using nothing.
How it is set up
- 1
A box the size of a router is plugged into an output on the desk and into the network. It is left there and not touched again.
- 2
The languages are chosen from the panel: the one spoken, and the ones it should be heard in.
- 3
A sign with a code goes by the door: whoever wants it scans it and picks a language. No app to install.
- 4
It is switched on only when there is a service. What is not spoken is not billed.
Why it fits a parish
Nobody has to hand anything out
No receivers, no headsets to return, no batteries, nobody at the door counting them. People use their own phone and their own earphones.
You pay for what is spoken
An hour-long service with forty minutes of speaking costs forty minutes. The organ, the silences and communion are not billed.
Several languages at once
In a place people pass through, you do not know whether Sunday brings Germans or Italians. You can have both open: the second language costs 0.35 of what the first one costs.
It also serves the hard of hearing
Hearing the service in the same language but clean and straight into the ear is half of the uses we had not planned for.
When this is not for you
If the parish has no mixing desk, or the microphone is far from whoever is speaking and picks up the whole nave, the result drops sharply. Audio quality rules everything here: what a person cannot make out, a machine cannot either. Before signing anything, record two minutes on a phone held to the speaker and listen back.
Questions people ask
- Does anybody have to install an app?
- No. Whoever is listening opens a link or scans a code and picks a language. It runs in the phone's browser, with no account and nothing to download.
- How long until it is heard?
- A few seconds. What sets the delay is not the network but the sentence: nothing can be translated well until somebody finishes saying it, so a long sentence takes longer than a short one.
- Can we use it only at Christmas and in summer?
- Yes. It is switched on and off from the panel, and only the speech that passes through it is billed. A room connected and silent costs nothing.
- What about what is said in confession or in private?
- Only what comes through the desk output you connected reaches us — that is, what is already going out over the PA. Nothing else is heard, stored or transcribed.