At The State University of New York (SUNY), Oswego, an interest in providing better live captions led to an investment in live translation services. Tyrone Johnson-Neuland, assistant director of instructional technologies, said the university has long provided sign language interpreters at commencement ceremonies and used a separate captioning service for livestreams. However, those captions aren’t practical for use inside the arena because of audio sync issues.
“With the delay of the stream, plus the delay in captioning, you could be looking at yourself speaking, and you’d be maybe even a minute behind, so it was really confusing to those in the room,” Johnson-Neuland said.
The university first tried an AI solution, Wordly, at its December 2024 commencement ceremony. According to Johnson-Neuland, the setup was relatively simple: Audio from the arena sound system was routed into a laptop running the service, and attendees accessed captions and translations through a link or QR code.
At that first commencement ceremony in 2024, Johnson-Neuland said the university only logged four users of the translation services, likely university faculty and staff testing it out. That number has grown to an average of 50 users, and as many as 70.
“At this point we’ll call that a success,” he said. “We still have somebody doing sign personally in the room, so it’s just another layer of accessibility.”
SUNY Oswego is expanding use of the service to other events. Last fall, 20 out of approximately 1,000 freshmen used the services at a welcome ceremony. Johnson-Neuland said the school has also considered offering translation and captions at sporting events and in class, but found it is best suited for gatherings in the arena.
Prior to these AI services, non-English speakers did not have any translation options available to them for big events, Johnson-Neuland said.
Even some institutions that already provide human translators, like the University of Southern California (USC), are using AI translation services to help fill gaps.
According to a Wordly case study of its work with USC, human translation services required students and families to make requests prior to the event, and the university could not meet those needs at orientation events.
Wordly CEO and founder Lakshman Ranthman said he attended a graduation ceremony at USC when the school relied on human translators, and he was unable to access services.
More than 700 orientation attendees have taken advantage of USC’s AI captioning and translation services since 2023, according to the study. USC reported that attendees used translation services in at least 18 languages including Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Persian and Tagalog.
Rantham said advances in speech recognition and language processing technology have allowed digital translation to evolve from traditional word-by-word conversion to now identifying meaningful phrases and sentence boundaries before translation. This is more similar to how human translation works, he said.
“We had to develop algorithms over time, not just for English, but for multiple languages that we support, to break [sentences] into meaningful chunks, and then do the translation,” he said.
Idioms and abstract terminology can still be difficult for AI translation systems, he said, but services like Wordly allow hosts to upload key phrases into a glossary before the event, to assist the recognition process.
Questions about AI accuracy and reliability remain, however, as colleges experiment with a growing range of AI tools. Research shows variability in AI’s translation accuracy for different languages, and several institutions have faced criticism for using AI-generated voice technology to announce graduate names at commencement ceremonies. Errors, in this case, led to some graduates’ names being skipped.
Johnson-Neuland said SUNY Oswego officials are impressed by the accuracy of AI translation but do not intend it to replace human name-readers.
“It’s just a bonus,” he said.
