Speech-to-Speech Translation: Hear the Translation, Don't Read It

VoxisLive is a speech-to-speech translation app for Windows. It listens to the spoken audio your PC plays — a video, a game, a meeting — and speaks the translation back to you in a natural voice, in real time. You hear the meaning the moment it is said, instead of reading subtitles and splitting your attention between the text and the screen.

What Is Speech-to-Speech Translation?

Speech-to-speech translation — sometimes called spoken translation or S2ST — takes audio in one language and returns audio in another. The input is a voice; the output is also a voice. That is the crucial difference from the translation most people are used to, where you type or paste text and read the result, or where a video shows you a line of subtitles to scan.

Under the hood, a complete speech-to-speech pipeline does three things: it recognizes the spoken words, translates their meaning into the target language, and synthesizes a new voice that says them aloud. VoxisLive runs this entire chain continuously so the result lands in your ears a few seconds after the original speaker — close enough to follow a conversation, a lecture, or a scene as it happens.

Because the output is spoken, you do not have to look anywhere. Your eyes stay on the gameplay, the slides, or the face of the person you are talking to. For a fuller comparison of the two approaches, see voice translation vs. subtitles.

Why Hearing Beats Reading

Subtitles work, but they cost you something. To read a caption you have to pull your gaze to the bottom of the screen, parse the text, and snap back to the action — many times a minute. In a fast scene you miss the visuals; in a game you miss the moment; in a meeting you stop watching the speaker entirely. Reading is a second task layered on top of watching.

Spoken translation removes that second task. The language you understand simply arrives through your speakers or headphones while everything you can see stays in front of you. It is the same reason live events use interpreters speaking into an earpiece rather than scrolling a transcript on a wall: hearing is how people naturally take in speech.

VoxisLive leans fully into that model. The translation is the audio. Captions still exist if you want them — you can export a transcript as TXT, SRT, or VTT after a session and search your history — but they are a record, not the thing you rely on in the moment.

How Simultaneous Spoken Interpretation Works

VoxisLive captures your system audio with the Windows WASAPI process-loopback interface. That means it reads the audio mix your PC is already playing — no virtual audio cable, no extra driver, and no bot joining your call. It also excludes its own output, so it never tries to translate the voice it just produced.

The captured speech is handled by a native simultaneous interpreter model. Rather than waiting for a sentence to finish, it begins translating while the speaker is still talking and stays a few seconds behind — exactly how a human interpreter works in a booth at a conference. That short, steady lag is what makes the spoken output feel live instead of stop-and-start.

There are two modes. In Video / Game mode the translation is one-way: the other voice comes into your language and the original audio is ducked so the spoken translation sits clearly on top. In Meeting mode it is two-way — the other party is translated into your language, and your own speech is translated into theirs and fed into a virtual microphone, all without any bot appearing in the participant list. For the full technical walkthrough, see how VoxisLive works.

Get Spoken Translation on Your PC

VoxisLive runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11 and speaks translation into 79 target languages. It is available primarily on the Microsoft Store, and there is also a free, open-source build on GitHub where you bring your own API key. Download VoxisLive to start hearing translations, or compare the plans first.

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