Your first call with Lingvoo

Lingvoo comes into your meeting much like a coworker would. You paste the link, the translator appears among the participants, and from then on each person who speaks is translated while they talk. You hear the translation spoken in the call itself, captions show on the translator’s tile, and anyone who wants can follow on a listener link in a browser. There is nothing for anyone to install.

What you need

• A Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom meeting, plus the link to join it.
• A person in the call who can let a participant in, in case the meeting has a waiting room.
• An Lingvoo account with an active plan. Ahead of your first meeting, the app asks you to pick a plan and add a card, and the plan or intro is paid at checkout. Sort this out before the call starts, not during its first minute.
• An idea of how far your minutes go. The language someone is speaking is free, so each minute of the call uses one minute less than the number of languages you chose: 2 languages = 1 minute, 3 languages = 2. In a two-language meeting, then, one intro minute lasts roughly one minute of talk. The free demo and the paid intro explains it in full.

Running the call

1. Set up your account. Go to app.lingvoo.com, sign up, and pick a plan; the intro is the lightest way to begin.
2. Grab the meeting link. Copy it from the calendar invitation: an address on meet.google.com, teams.microsoft.com (or teams.live.com), or zoom.us. Take all of it. On some platforms the passcode sits after the question mark, and a shortened link will not let anyone in.
3. Paste the link into Lingvoo and choose the languages people will speak. There is no “from” and “to” here, just one list: every language anyone will use, 2 to 10 in total, and Lingvoo figures out which one each speaker is using as they go. Two regional versions of one language, like English (US) and English (UK), count as a single language, so you still need two languages that are truly different.
4. Let the translator join. Lingvoo enters the meeting as a participant. When the meeting has a waiting room or lobby, it waits there until the host lets it in with the same click used for any guest.
5. Pass on the listener link. You do not have to: people in the call already hear the translation. What the link adds is captions and a language of each person’s choosing on their own screen. Every meeting gets a separate link. Once the translator is in, it drops the link into the meeting chat on its own (a brief message in English, pinned in Google Meet and Microsoft Teams), and Lingvoo puts it on your clipboard as soon as the session begins, so you can paste it yourself if the chat message gets lost. While the session is Active, you can copy it again from the session screen. Anyone who opens it in a browser picks a language; if the status line asks for play, a single tap on Play starts the sound, and the same button pauses it. From that point they follow the call through captions and translated audio, with no account and no install. One session can serve up to 500 listener connections like this. Following a call with the listener link is a guide written for the people you invite, so send it along with the link if Lingvoo is new to them.
6. Just talk. Each person uses their own language, and the translator speaks every turn in the other languages inside the call while the conversation keeps going. Anyone who would rather read can follow the captions.
7. Wrap up. The translator leaves when the call ends, along with everyone else, or sooner if you remove it from your dashboard. Minutes run only while it is in the call, and the language being spoken is free: 2 languages use 1 minute per minute, 3 languages use 2. Hold on to the listener link if you would like to read the captions again later; Privacy and your data explains how that works.

When something doesn’t work

The translator didn’t show up

• Look in the waiting room first. Most first joins are just waiting for someone to let them in.
• Make sure you pasted the join link for the meeting, not a calendar page or a shortened link that dropped its passcode.
• Start the meeting before you send Lingvoo in; if the call has not started, nobody is there to admit it.

The translator left partway through the call

Nearly always, this means the minute balance hit zero. From there the session keeps going on a grace allowance of 10 billed minutes (roughly ten more minutes of call with two languages, five with three), and after that the translator leaves and the session ends. A new session needs at least 5 minutes of the call on the balance (5 minutes with two languages, 10 with three), so an account that is almost empty cannot just start over. Keep this in mind when you plan: with three languages, every minute of the call uses two minutes.

A long call ended after eight hours

Each session can last up to 8 hours. For the rest of the meeting, start a new session and share its new listener link, since the old link belongs to the session that ended.

A listener hears nothing

There are usually two simple reasons. Either the sound is paused (Lingvoo starts it when a language is picked, but a browser may block that first try, and the status line then asks for a tap on Play), or no one has spoken a different language yet. Spoken translation only comes when someone uses one of the other languages, because nobody gets their own language translated back to them. Captions keep going meanwhile: everything said is captioned, and lines in the listener’s own language show as the original text.

A participant’s language isn’t in the session

The language list is set when the session starts and cannot be changed during the meeting. Stop the session, start a new one with every language included, and share the new listener link.

Each platform has its own guide with the details: Lingvoo in Google Meet, Lingvoo in Microsoft Teams, and Lingvoo in Zoom.