Method
Three pieces. You already own two of them.
You talk the way you always talk. The laptop listens, the screens read along, and nothing about the meeting changes.
01The room
The foreman speaks. The laptop at the front of the room hears him through the mic he is already using, and every screen on the wall shows the same sentence in its own language, a second or two behind the words.
Nobody in the crew installs anything, holds anything, or signs in to anything. They look up.
02The signal path
What actually happens to your voice.
The browser reads your microphone and streams the audio straight to the speech service — it does not go through a CrewEcho server on the way. Words come back as they are recognised, first as a rough guess and then corrected as the sentence finishes, which is why a line on the screen firms up a moment after it appears.
Most languages are translated on that same connection. A few need a second hop through us — Haitian Creole is the main one — where the recognised English is sent to a translation service and comes back in Creole. That is why Creole lands a beat after Spanish does: you are watching a real round trip, not a stagger we added.
Nothing in that path is written down. What we store and what we do not is set out in full on the privacy page, including the part where that Creole text crosses our server.
03Setup
What you need, and what you don’t.
The mic
Whatever you already talk into. A lav or a headset on the foreman beats every software setting we could give you — it is the single biggest factor in how good the captions are.
The laptop
Any laptop with a browser, at the front of the room. Nothing to install. It stays open for the length of the talk.
The screens
Any TV or monitor with a browser, or a cheap stick behind one. One per language. They open full-screen and you leave them up all morning.
The connection
Internet at the trailer or a hotspot. Captions are text, so the bandwidth is trivial — it is the reliability that matters, not the speed.
04When it breaks
What happens when the connection drops.
The screens hold their last captions
They do not clear, and they do not show an error over the top of the talk. Whatever was last on the wall stays on the wall, which is the right failure: a crew reading a slightly stale sentence is better off than a crew looking at a blank TV.
The session resumes on its own
When the connection comes back the captions pick up from what is being said then. It does not try to catch up on what it missed — replaying two minutes of old safety instructions onto a wall while the foreman is talking about something else would be worse than the gap.
You will know
The live indicator on the controller and on every screen stops saying LIVE. It is a word as well as a colour, so it reads the same from the back of the room and to anyone who cannot pick lime out from grey.
Plan for it
Bring a hotspot the way you would for anything else on a site with no trailer. Captions are text and need almost no bandwidth, but they do need the connection to be there.