Following a meeting with the listener link

The link you were sent is the translation feed for one meeting. Whoever is running that call has Akume translating it live, and the link lets you hear and read the conversation in whichever of the meeting’s languages suits you. There is no account to create and nothing to install: a browser is all it takes. If you are in the call yourself, you already hear the translation there, spoken by the translator; the link adds captions and lets you pick your own language.

Three steps

1. Open the link in your browser. It goes straight to the page for that meeting. You are not asked to sign up, and there is nothing to download.
2. Choose the language you want to hear. The page offers the languages this meeting was set up with. They were chosen before the call started and stay the same until it ends.
3. Listen. The status line on the page says whether the audio is playing; if it asks you to press play, tap the Play button once. The same button pauses, so a second tap stops the sound again.

If you are sitting in the meeting itself as well, listen through headphones. Translated speech coming out of your laptop speakers is picked up by your microphone and sent back into everyone else’s call.

What you get

• Spoken translation in the language you chose, while people talk.
• Live captions of the same conversation, for reading along or reading instead.
• A meeting can be followed in several languages at once: every listener picks their own, and a single session allows up to 500 listener connections (every time the link is opened in a browser counts as one, a page reload included, and closing the tab does not give it back).

Why it may be silent at first

Quiet at the beginning of a call is usually normal rather than broken. Two explanations cover nearly every case.

The audio is paused

Akume tries to start the sound the moment you pick a language, but a browser can still refuse that first attempt. The status line on the page tells you which happened: if it asks you to press play, tap the Play button once. The button is a play/pause toggle, so if the sound was running until you touched it, that tap is what stopped it. Tap again to carry on.

Nobody has spoken a different language yet

Spoken translation is produced only for the other languages in the session: your own language is never read back to you. Listening in English while everyone in the room is speaking English gives you silence by design, and the moment someone switches to another of the meeting’s languages you start hearing them. The captions carry on throughout: every utterance is captioned, and the ones in your own language appear as the original text, so the page is never actually empty.

Good to know

• The link belongs to one session. The next meeting has a different one, and if the host stops and restarts a session (to add a language, for instance), they will share a fresh link and the old one goes quiet.
• The translator is in plain sight. It joins the call as a participant and appears in the participant list, like any other guest.
• The link is for following the call. You listen and read through it; you speak in the meeting itself the way you always do.
• A session lasts at most 8 hours. A longer meeting is run as two sessions, and the second one comes with a new link.

Privacy in one line

Meetings are translated live and no recording is kept after the call. While the session runs, the captions are readable by anyone who has this link; afterwards they stay only in the account that ran the session. Privacy and data protection covers the rest.

If something is not working

• You hear nothing at all. Read the status line and tap Play if it asks you to, then check your device volume and that the browser tab is not muted.
• Audio stops, or the captions freeze. Refresh the page and choose your language again. The stream picks up wherever the conversation has got to, and Play is there if the status line asks for it.
• Wrong language, or you would rather have another. Choose the language again on the same page.
• Nothing arrives whatever you try. Check with the host that the meeting is still running and the translator is still in it. A session ends when the host stops it, when the account runs out of translation minutes, or after eight hours, and an ended session’s link stays quiet.

When the meeting is running and the page still gives you nothing, the host can stop the session and start a fresh one, which produces a new link for everybody. If the trouble survives that, tell us at support@akume.ai. What you saw and which language you had picked is enough to start with.