About
A live event shouldn’t leave half the room behind.
tlive started as a tool for our own bilingual meetings in Hong Kong. It is now a product any organiser can run alone: one QR code, and every guest follows in the language they think in.
Where it started
A room that kept splitting in two.
A business meeting in Hong Kong rarely holds one language for an hour. A speaker drops into Cantonese for the story, switches back to English for the numbers, and a part of the room quietly stops following. Nobody complains — they just stop asking questions.
The fixes on offer were an interpreter booth priced for a conference budget, or a translation feature buried in a platform tier that only works if every single guest is inside that platform. Neither suits a group running four events a year with no AV technician.
So we built what we wanted for our own meetings, ran it in front of real audiences, and kept the part that held up: captions and translated audio delivered to the phone already in the guest’s hand.
多謝大家今日出席，我哋先講返上個季度嘅數字。
FollowingLost the threadWith tlive, the same sentence reaches every guest
How it was shaped
Three decisions everything else follows from.
- 01
Instead of hardware receivers
Phones, not receivers.
Every guest arrives holding a screen with earphones already paired to it. Receivers have to be counted out, charged, collected and replaced when they walk out the door. One link serves ten guests or two hundred and fifty, and the guest list never has to be known in advance.
- 02
Instead of annual seats
Minutes, not seats.
Time is charged by the second, for the features actually switched on. An organiser with four events a year should not be buying twelve months of licences, and should not have to forecast an audience size to get a price.
- 03
Instead of Cantonese as an afterthought
Cantonese first.
Most live-translation tools reach Cantonese somewhere after Mandarin, or not at all. It is the language our own meetings run in, so it is the first one we test against — including the mixed Cantonese-and-English sentences people here actually speak.
One job, done properly.
tlive is not a meeting platform and not an interpreter agency. It adds a single layer to the event you already run: the guest’s own language, on the guest’s own phone. Every feature is judged against that sentence, which is why the product stays small enough to set up in a couple of minutes.
How it is built
Live, and then gone.
Speech is transcribed and translated as it is spoken and turned straight into text. The transcript is yours to download or delete; the audio is never written to a disk in the first place.
Read the data and security page- Runs at the edge
- The site and every live room run on Cloudflare, close to wherever your event is happening.
- Two engines
- Source captions come from Google Gemini; translated captions and voices come from OpenAI.
- Guests stay anonymous
- No sign-in, no app, and nothing asked of the people in your audience — not a name, not an email.
Where it stands
In use, and still being sharpened.
tlive runs real events today, and credits are bought by card without talking to anyone. Two things people ask for most — a custom dictionary for names and industry terms, and speaker labels — are not built yet, and we say so on the FAQ rather than letting you find out on the day.
See what is and isn’t in the product- 20 credits free on signup, no card
- Up to 250 guests on one link
- 13 audience languages
Built in Hong Kong. Priced in USD, because the rooms were never all in one city.
About two minutes from signup to your first caption.
Continue with Google, create an event, share the QR code. That is the whole setup.