Salam.AI vs. a Human Interpreter

The honest comparison

What it actually costs to translate a room, today

Not to replace every human interpreter — a seasoned conference or court interpreter still does a different, harder job. This is about the far more common case: a meeting, service, tour or broadcast that today gets either no translation, or one booked at real cost and real notice.

Days–weeks

typical booking lead time for a qualified interpreter, longer for less common pairs like Malay ↔ Khmer or Malay ↔ Burmese

< 10 seconds

from opening a browser tab to a live, spoken, subtitled translation — any hour, any day

A human interpreter's typical hourly rate

Illustrative industry range — real rates vary by market, language pair and notice given. Shown to frame the comparison, not as a quote.

~US$50/hr ~US$150+/hr

$0$50$100$150$200+

…and professional simultaneous interpreting is commonly booked as a pair per language, in half- or full-day minimums, because sustained simultaneous interpreting is cognitively demanding enough that industry guidance calls for rotating roughly every 20–30 minutes. A single evening event covering three languages can mean six interpreter-bookings before anyone reaches a microphone — Salam.AI runs the same evening, in all three languages, from one browser tab, metered by the minute.

Cost to reach more people

Conceptual — illustrates how the two cost structures diverge as an audience grows. Not literal pricing.

Traditional interpreting — a booth/interpreter per site, per language

Salam.AI — one session, one shared stream, any audience size

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Dimension-by-dimension comparison
Dimension	A professional human interpreter	Salam.AI
Time to get started	Booked days to weeks ahead; last-minute requests often go unfilled for less common pairs.	Open a tab and start in seconds, any hour, any day.
Languages per session	One language pair per interpreter booked — a 5-language event needs 5+ separate bookings.	Up to 5 simultaneous output languages from one session, 100 to choose from.
Scaling to a bigger audience	Bounded by the room, the headset inventory and the interpreter's stamina; a second site means booking again from scratch.	One listen link fans out over HLS to any number of listeners at constant marginal cost.
Session length & fatigue	Simultaneous interpreting is demanding — industry guidance calls for a second interpreter and rotation roughly every 20–30 minutes.	Runs the full session — a two-hour service or a six-hour conference — without a rotation.
Travel & equipment	Travel, accommodation and booth/headset hire for on-site work; remote interpreting still needs dedicated gear.	A browser and a microphone — the room's own laptop or a phone tab is enough.
Recordings	Rarely recorded with a documented chain of custody by default.	Optional one-click recording, encrypted end-to-end in the browser before upload.
What drives the cost	Per interpreter, per hour or per day, with half/full-day minimums, multiplied by every language and every location.	Metered by minutes of audio translated — one predictable unit, whichever of the 100 languages is chosen.