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When World’s Collide – AI vs Human Captions for events

Live captions at events

Julia Danmeri, founder and CEO of TranslateAble, explores the balance of adopting AI for translation at events and shares how her personal experience at an event helped shape TranslateAble’s new captions service for the industry.

As a seasoned event organiser, I’m fascinated by how AI is enabling language accessibility and opening up experiences that were previously inaccessible due to language barriers. (If you’re a language professional, don’t throw stones – hear me out on this one!)

On a day-to-day basis, my personal experience with AI has been incredibly useful, particularly when travelling. I love that no matter where I am in the world, I can scan a menu and – poof – up pops a translation. Anything that helps me find delicious food, I’m on board with. And as a business owner, I’m also streamlining administratively heavy tasks that previously consumed so much of my time – the dream!

What has really amazed me is how adopting AI technologies has led to an increase in enquiries from event teams who had never previously considered using language services for their events. We’ve seen a rise in event professionals approaching TranslateAble for support with AI-generated captions in multiple languages for their event campaigns.

I love that AI is prompting event professionals to think more carefully about who can access their events and realising they have more tools to reach and include a wider audience. This can only be a good thing, right?

Overall, I was positive about AI as an enabler for language services at events. That was until I attended a specific event earlier this year that had such an impact on me, it made me rethink my attitude to AI and see, first-hand, how it can seriously fall short if not executed properly.

This particular event took place during an especially busy week for me, so my plan was to sit at the back and listen casually to the sessions while doing a bit of work. The panel came on stage, introduced themselves in the usual fashion, before launching into 45 minutes of total vulnerability I had never seen before at an event in my 20+ year career.

These six speakers bared their souls as they shared harrowing stories and experiences from their lives. I was horrified by what they had gone through and felt an immense wave of sadness for the people sitting on stage in front of me. I sat there, stunned, trying to process the lives they had lived.

And then…the AI captions caught my eye.

To be fair, the captions were generally accurate, and we all know that AI is still learning. However, when one speaker, sharing deeply personal experiences, was in the middle of her story, the AI struggled to accurately pick up her Northern English accent. And it wasn’t just a one-off. It was jarringly out of place against the emotional backdrop of the discussion taking place on stage. 

By the end of the event, I felt the panellists deserved better. They were sharing such personal stories – they deserved to be heard in full, down to the very last detail. In my view, human-generated captions would have been the better choice in this situation. Human captions would have helped the audience connect with and understand the speakers’ emotions more fully, avoiding the distractions of AI errors. 

As event organisers, our job is to bring people together to share in meaningful experiences. We spend so much time meticulously planning our events and their content, but how often do we think about the tools we use and whether they are appropriate for our audiences, subject matter, and the communities our events serve?

We create these events to give people a platform for human connection. While we’re racing to adopt the latest technologies to streamline processes, save time and reduce costs, we must be mindful of where and when we replace humans in the event delivery process. We risk losing that personal touch – the spark that ignites emotions and fuels passion.

Think carefully about the humans you’re taking out of the event process and ask yourself what effect that might have on your attendees. Sometimes, the AI solution is absolutely perfect: it fits the budget, you’ve seen it work well before and it’s a great option. But make sure you explore all the possibilities, understand why you’re using it and consider who it will affect.

We invest so much time as event professionals in creating those “wow” moments at our events. It’s crucial that AI doesn’t undo some of that magic or dilute the emotional impact you want attendees to feel. Instead, AI should be a functional tool that frees up your time, enabling you to grow your events in ways you never thought possible. We all dream of hosting fully inclusive, accessible events, but in doing so, we must ensure that we don’t lose the human element along the way.

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Want to know more about TranslateAble’s captions services for events? Or would like to discuss your upcoming event projects? Drop us a line to book in a call or share an RFP.