Has anyone has success with a translation AI tool during live meetings for providing captioning in english and french?  We have used Teams and run into problems with timing the flow of the meeting.

We're experiencing the same challenge. Our teams operate in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and many of our Microsoft Teams meetings are held in a single language. Unfortunately, this often limits participation for those who don't fully understand the language being used. We've tested Microsoft Teams Premium for live translation and transcription, but the results haven't been very reliable. I'm currently exploring more effective solutions to make our meetings truly inclusive and accessible for everyone.

I'm not sure what you mean by "problems with timing, etc". To ensure live-translation-AI functions optimally during a streaming live meeting from the end-user’s perspective, keep the following  in mind such as:

1. Low Latency: Real-time translation requires minimal delays. The AI system (and hosting services(infra)) should process audio input, translate it, and generate the output within milliseconds to avoid noticeable lag for users.

2. Accurate Speech-to-Text Conversion: The solution must accurately transcribe spoken words (language-understanding), even in noisy environments or with diverse accents. Advanced Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models with robust noise cancellation and adaptability to different accents/dialects are essential.

3. High Translation Accuracy: AI must handle context-specific terminology, idioms, and nuances effectively. This requires training on domain-specific data and dynamic adaptation to conversation context. Now your provider (Google was it?) should be capable doing so but you'd try to get your hands on trustworthy benchmark-results.

4. Real-Time Feedback: Subtitles or translated audio must be displayed or spoken in sync with the speaker’s timing to maintain the flow of the meeting. However it depends on a lot of aspects to control. Mostly infra-related (latency) and load-processing (such as nr 2).

5. Audio Quality: Also additional to nr 2: High-quality audio input is essential. Users should use noise-canceling microphones, and the AI should include audio preprocessing to handle background noise and distortions.

6. Bandwidth and Streaming Optimization: The solution should adapt to varying internet bandwidths. Compression and buffering technologies can ensure the translation remains stable even on unstable connections. So as for nr 3: get your hands on benchmarks.

7. Customization: Sometimes a solution provides the ability to add user-specific glossaries (e.g., company-specific jargon or technical terms) which improves translation relevance and accuracy. I don't know if it's a standard Google-offering.

8. Accessibility Features: User-expectations could arise issues which perhaps are not an issue at all. Cause everyone has a different perception how a solution should behave. So inspect also your UX-requirements: The system should cater to different accessibility needs, such as providing visual indicators for hearing-impaired users or multiple voice options for spoken translations.

9. Integration with Meeting Platforms: Seamless integration with popular platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams ensures ease of use but could invoke complex integration-setups (and possibly latency-effects).

10. Resilience to Interruptions: Inspect the solution-architecture for robust against interruptions, such as overlapping speakers, sudden audio cuts, or dropped connections, and should recover gracefully.

11. Feedback Mechanisms: Including mechanisms for real-time user feedback (e.g., flagging incorrect translations) allows end-users to reflect their UX and increases user engagement.

So overall, try to get your hands on benchmark-results / service-reports from your provider / system-integrator. Try to define solid service-level-objects and translate them to a SLA-need and inspect your provider if current services are covered by your needs. Inspect your internal infrastructure and integration-features with your live-meeting-requirements.

Success!