That one time a Live Translation Tool ran therapy session..

“¿Qué debe suceder a continuación? "- "What needs to Happen next" in Spanish by my translator!!

How it started:

A legend who I had the privilege to work with went back home and shared her story of transformation. We worked on her boundary and it improved her relationships in life.

Hearing her story, now her friend wants to do a session.

Well, word of mouth is how a therapy practice grows. So nothing out of the ordinary in this situation..

Except.. this friend of hers, who wants to do a session doesn't speak even a tiny bit of English. She can only speak and understand Spanish, that too Chilean Spanish.

And the therapist - that will be me - doesn't speak any Spanish other than a few phrases like como estas, muy bien, si si.. you get the idea.

But she really wanted to do a session. And I do love a good challenge, especially when it allows you to help someone at the same time.

Therapy sessions in the time of AI 👊

I agreed to run a session for her and immediately got on to my search - the search to find a tool that could make this happen.

What I was looking for, was a two way Live translation tool which would convert Spanish into English for me while converting English into Spanish for her.

There were plenty of live transcribing tools out there. But that is not good enough for the task at hand. I may have time to read the translated text but for her, if she had to read through translated text during a therapy session wouldn't offer an ideal experience.

I heard that Google meet had a Live translation service. I saw a demo and it had Spanish to English translation and I was excited. But soon realised that it wouldn't work very well in my situation and it also meant that we both need to be on a premium plan to get this feature. But more importantly I couldn't figure out a way it will do a 2 way live translation.

So I continued with my research and finally found it..!!!

Drumroll please....

Krisp AI

AI Live Translation in action

Here you can see how AI Live Translation is working and this is exactly what I needed.

Although this specific tool was designed for B2B companies and Call centre oriented businesses, this tool is perfect for therapists too, in emergency cases.

So I signed up for a 7 day trial (need to pay around US$100 for the trial) and gave it a test run with the bit of language that I could test and it was working alright.

With that confidence I agreed to the session and gave the meeting link.

When it was time, the girl who speaks only Spanish and me who doesn't speak any Spanish joined the meeting. After a couple of minutes of testing out the system in real situation, we were on! We were having a conversation with this AI tool as our mediator! Crazy times indeed!

But I have to be completely honest here. The live AI translation wasn't really perfect. Some times it translated some weird things but most of the time it did work too.

With about 80% accuracy, we ran a full session with the help of an AI tool!

I also used a method called Hummingbird method which is simpler easier (yet powerful) process to explore the subconscious narratives. Hence language usage was minimal from my side and we mainly use a few phrases to run the process. So the translations couldn't really go wrong. All in all, it was a decent session.

But if the session was decent or not is actually decided by the other person and not me.

So here is the message I got from my friend after a couple of days.

Now I can safely say that it was a decent session, even though there were some translation hiccups and technical issues.

But if you were living in 2010, would you have imagined a cost effective near instantaneous 2 way live translation over a video call? Would you have dared to take on a client whose language you don't speak?

It is pretty exciting to live in the era of AI. Maybe you're worried about robots revolting against humans. But when they don't do it, there are some benefits like this case too.

So would you be open to a AI translated therapy session if your therapists didn't speak your language?