Business events in Hong Kong are rarely monolingual. In a single chapter meeting someone presents in Cantonese, someone asks in Mandarin, and the slides are in English. That is the norm, not the exception. It is exactly the setting where live translation is most valuable — and where it is most easily over-promised.
Here is what an organiser should actually know before adopting it.
Audio capture matters more than anything else
At a real event, the quality of the audio reaching the system affects recognition accuracy far more than any other factor. It is routinely overlooked, because attention goes to “which model are you using”.
The practical order of preference:
- A line from the mixing desk. If the venue has a PA system, take one output from the desk into the computer. This is the best case by a wide margin.
- A dedicated speaker microphone. A lavalier or handheld mic captures the speaker, not the room.
- The laptop’s built-in microphone picking up the hall. It works, but echo and audience chatter measurably pull accuracy down.
If you can only improve one thing, improve the audio. Do not spend that time comparing settings.
Speed and code-switching are the second variable
Cantonese business speech has a few traits that raise the difficulty: it is fast, it mixes English freely (“呢個 project 嘅 timeline”), and it is dense with company names and personal names.
None of that is unmanageable, but it explains why the same system can perform very differently from one event to the next. A slow, single-language, general-topic talk and a rapid, Cantonese-English referral pitch full of proper nouns are two different levels of difficulty.
Test with your own content, not a headline accuracy figure
A single accuracy percentage from any vendor — including us — cannot tell you how the system will do at your event. Too many variables are yours: your speakers, your audio, your industry’s vocabulary.
A cheap way to find out:
- Use the trial to play a recording from a previous event, or have a colleague talk for three minutes at their normal pace.
- Make sure the content includes the terms your industry actually uses and a few real names.
- Ask a native speaker of the target language to read the output and answer one question: “Could you follow it?” Do not ask whether there were mistakes — there will be. The question is whether they got in the way of understanding.
The 20-credit trial — 20 minutes in captions-only mode, or five minutes with one translated voice — is enough to run this test.
Set expectations before you start
Live translation is not a proofread subtitle file. It is fast, and it is good enough to follow a talk; it is not a publishable transcript.
One sentence at the start of the event removes most of the disappointment afterwards:
Captions are generated live by AI. They may contain errors, but they are good enough to follow along.
In our experience that one line shifts the audience from “spotting mistakes” to “using the captions”.
What it cannot do yet
Two things are worth stating plainly: there is no custom glossary for proper nouns yet (so an unusual company name may be spelled wrong), and there is no speaker diarisation (the transcript is continuous and does not label who spoke). Both are on the roadmap, but neither should be evaluated today as if it already existed.
If your event mixes Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, note that tlive lets you set the source language to auto-detect, which handles the switch between the two without anyone touching a setting mid-session. Details are on the hybrid and in-person events page.
Want to test it with your own event material? Try 20 credits free — no credit card required.