About a minute and a half, end to end: choosing languages, checking your audio, going live, pausing during worship, getting the link to guests, and finding the transcript afterwards.
Before the service
- Sign in to SynaiTranslate on the computer connected to your sound desk. It opens on the Console tab.
- Go to Settings → Languages. Under Which language is spoken at the front?, check the Main language is what will actually be said from the front — not Auto-detect. If a second language is spoken from the front too, add it as Also spoken. See Choose translation languages for why.
- On the same page, under Which languages should people be able to follow?, add the languages you want captions translated into. The total under the list shows how fast a service uses your translation hours.
- Back on the Console, in Where does the sound come from?, choose Sound desk input under Feed, then the input that carries your sound desk mix under Device.
- Speak a few words and check the Level meter says Speaking. Captions themselves appear once you go live.
- Get the link to guests. For printing, open Settings → QR codes for guests’ phones: the Guest link · phones card has the link and Download QR, and the printed code does not change week to week. The Console shows the same link with a copy button, for handing it over mid-service.
Running it
- Press Go live. That one button opens the session, connects the captioning engine and publishes to everyone reading along. If the input is silent, the Console asks first; choose Go live anyway only if the room really is quiet.
- Watch the captions in the Phones and Venue screens previews on the Console through the service.
- During a long song or a break, press Pause translation. Captions, translated audio and the translation clock stop; Resume translation brings them back.
- If the captions fall behind or stop, check the audio reaching the computer first, then press Resync.
- When the service ends, press End session. Captions stop on every screen and phone at once, and the transcript is saved under History.
The thing that decides everything
Caption quality is almost entirely audio quality. A feed from the sound desk gives good captions; a laptop microphone at the back of a hall does not, and no setting compensates. If the video makes one point worth copying, it is that one.
Rehearse once on a weekday with your actual sound system. Every first-time failure is an audio routing problem, and Sunday at 10:25 is the worst moment to discover it.
Next
- Run a session from the console — the same ground in more detail
- Share a caption link — guest links, QR codes and the browser overlay
- Live captions aren’t appearing — if something is wrong mid-service