Help

One person talks at a time, like a walkie-talkie. Wait for their name to disappear from the top of the screen, then hold Talk.

Only when you press Talk, at events that allow attendees to speak. Allow it, then hold the button again and talk. The microphone is used only while you hold it, and nothing is recorded. If you only want to listen, you never need to allow it.

Tap the big Listen button once. Phones will not start audio on their own — a tap is required by the browser, and until you make it nothing plays.

Then check your earbuds are connected to this phone, and that the volume is up. On an iPhone, the side switch does not silence this.

That is captions only, and it is deliberate. The list says so before you choose, and the screen says so after.

It happens for two reasons. A few languages — Krio and Liberian English and Lingala among them — have no synthetic voice anywhere in the world, from anyone. And an event can deliberately run a language as text: we host the voices for 16 African languages ourselves and one machine speaks two of them at a time, so an event offering more chooses which two are spoken aloud. Live translated text is a real option, not a failure.

If your language normally speaks and has gone quiet, that is different — the person running the session sees it too and is already looking at it.

Tap Show captions at the bottom of the screen. The two A buttons beside it make the text bigger.

Nothing is wrong — nobody is talking at that moment. You are still connected, and words appear the moment someone speaks. Leave the page open.

It is meant to. Interpretation waits for a whole sentence before translating it, so it arrives roughly one sentence after the person on stage. A human interpreter lags the same way and for the same reason.

Tap More languages under the list. Depending on how the event is set up you will either be able to turn your language on yourself, or ask for it — the button tells you which before you tap it.

It should not — this is tested for, and audio keeps playing with the screen locked. If it does stop, keep the screen on and the page open. Some older browsers cannot prevent a device sleeping, and the page says so when that is the case.

The code may be mistyped, or the session may not have started. Check the code on the sign in your venue and try again — or ask at the registration desk.

Press Check everything works at least ten minutes before you start. It confirms every provider is reachable — and for the self-hosted voices it is also what wakes the machine, which takes over a minute from cold. The check is the warm-up.

Watch the meter under Microphone. If it is not moving, the room is not reaching us: check the cable, the mixer output, and that you picked the right input in the dropdown. The meter is dimmed and empty whenever nothing is arriving, so an unmoving bar means exactly what it looks like.

A phone or laptop is a legitimate microphone for a small venue — but only while its screen stays on. A sleeping device stops sending audio silently.

That language alone has failed; the others are unaffected and keep running. Attendees on it are told, and see captions if text is still coming through. It usually recovers on its own. If it does not, the session can continue without it.

If it refuses with a message about interpretation hours, the account has none. Nothing else stops a session from starting — running out of hours never does, because we will not cut a room off mid-session.

Open Other controls and use Stop interpreting for a moment. Listeners stay connected and are told why, rather than being left in a silence that looks like a failure. Press it again when the talking resumes.

Use Who is speaking and pick their language. Nobody is dropped, interpretation switches, and anyone listening in the new language is told it is now being spoken directly.

Press Put the QR code on screen and let them scan it. Failing that, the short code and the six-digit number both work typed in at infinispeak.com.

Open the same console on a phone or tablet. It will alarm if audio stops reaching the session — useful if the machine feeding the microphone is somewhere you cannot see.

Print the event’s code once. It sends whoever scans it to whichever session is running — live first, then one on a break, then the next one due. Signs are printed once and delegates should not have to notice which session they are in.

One language-hour is one language being listened to for one hour. Attendee numbers change nothing: five people or five hundred cost the same. A language nobody selects costs nothing, so offering more than you expect to be used is safe.

Go over your allowance and interpretation keeps running at $6 per language-hour. You are warned at 70%, 85% and 100%.

Add them under Words not to translate on the event. Without it the interpreter does the reasonable thing and translates a name, and a delegate hears a sentence that makes sense and is about nothing. You can also give a pronunciation, which is a separate problem — a protected name can still be read aloud wrongly.

Open People beside your organisation in the console — people belong to the organisation, not to one event, so you can do this before you have created anything.

Add them by email and choose what they may do. They do not need an account first: the invitation is claimed the moment they sign in, and they can sign in with Google or a link to their own address.

These are enforced, not advisory. Someone set to run sessions who tries to change an event is refused by the service, and the console does not offer them the button in the first place.

Remove anyone at any time; it takes effect immediately. An organisation always keeps at least one owner, so the last one cannot be removed — locking yourself out of your own events would mean asking us to let you back in.

101 are available and they are grouped by what they can do, because the groups behave differently on the day. Most are cloud voices with no practical limit. Fifteen African languages we run ourselves, and one machine carries two of those at a time — the console says which are speaking and which are shipping captions.

Attendees stream audio to their own phones, so the venue’s wifi matters. For a large room, a dedicated network for interpretation is worth arranging; mobile data is a fallback, not a plan. Captions alone use very little, and the console can switch to captions only if the connection is struggling.

An organisation’s roles stop at its own edge — even an owner sees only their own events. Platform access is separate: it reaches every customer organisation at owner level, and only InfiniSpeak can grant it.

It exists so somebody can help a customer at eight in the morning without asking them to hand over their account.

InfiniSpeak staff at the top of the console, shown only to people who already have platform access. Add by email; they must have signed in at least once, because the access attaches to an existing account and cannot be issued in advance.

Revoking takes effect immediately rather than at the end of a cache window — the half of this that matters.

A single secret that also reaches everything. It stays as break-glass: it is what grants the first named admin, and what gets in if every account is locked out.

Day to day, use a named account instead. A token is identical for everyone who holds it, so nothing it does can be attributed to a person, and when somebody leaves it has to be rotated for everybody at once.