Two minutes, end to end: opening the console, checking your audio, choosing languages, getting the link to guests, going live, and ending cleanly.
Before the service
- Open Live Translation on the machine connected to your sound desk. It opens on the Console tab.
- Go to Settings → Languages. Under Which language is spoken at the front?, check the Main language is what will actually be said from the front — not Auto-detect. See Choose translation languages for why.
- Back on the Console, in Where does the sound come from?, pick the input that carries your sound desk mix.
- Under Which languages should people be able to follow?, add the languages you want captions translated into.
- Open Settings, then Screens, then Phones & QR code. The Guest link · phones card has the link and Download QR — get it out to people. The printed code does not change week to week.
- Speak a few words and check the Level meter says Speaking. Captions themselves appear once you go live.
Running it
- Press Go live. That one button opens the session, connects the captioning engine and publishes to everyone reading along.
- Watch the captions on the console through the service.
- When the service ends, press End session and confirm.
- If they stop, check the audio reaching the machine before touching any setting.
The thing that decides everything
Caption quality is almost entirely audio quality. A feed from the sound desk gives good captions; a laptop microphone at the back of a hall does not, and no setting compensates. If the video makes one point worth copying, it is that one.
Rehearse once on a weekday with your actual sound system. Every first-time failure is an audio routing problem, and Sunday at 10:25 is the worst moment to discover it.
Next
- Run a session from the console — the same ground in more detail
- Share a caption link — guest links, QR codes and the browser overlay
- Live captions aren’t appearing — if something is wrong mid-service