Our Analysts' Insights

When health care practitioners, governmental agencies, or businesses want to leverage the power of video remote interpreting (VRI) to enable communications, they need to plan ahead. Or at least, they had to until today.

LanguageLine (#1 on CSA Research’s list of largest telephone interpreting companies) today unveiled its new VRI product, InSight Video Interpreting, a solution available on Apple, Android, and Windows devices with built-in encryption. The multi-modal solution enables registered users to access telephone and video interpreters, or even translators for short on-screen text. The service is available 24/7 in 34 spoken languages plus sign language and requires no prior scheduling.

VRI is a fast-growing segment of the interpreting market. In response, developing VRI technology has become the new trend in the interpreting world. CloudInterpreter, Interpretnet, iTerpret, Mastervoice Cloud Interpretation, VoiceBoxer, ZipDX are among the many companies trying to develop breakthrough technology. They seek either a piece of the current market or to create new demand for remote interpreting services.

Why is this new product from LanguageLine particularly interesting? CSA Research spoke with Scott W. Klein, the company’s President and CEO. We found two distinguishing features:

• LanguageLine has the interpreter network to support the service. Many nifty new offerings that we’ve seen provide only the technology, thus requiring customers to develop their own supply chain – which is often inexistent or very limited. Klein claims a network of 8,000 linguists, 95% of whom are LanguageLine employees working either from call centers or home. The company has an internal training and certification program to develop the skills of its interpreters. This investment in people enables on demand global service, in more languages than any other VRI provider on the market, and with a target fulfillment rate of request to reach a minimum of 95%.


• The company designed a system for the future. LanguageLine spent over US$20 million in developing Olympus, a platform that it first deployed last year to service over-the-phone (OPI) customers quickly and accurately. Part of that investment involved building a system to underpin future language access solutions such as InSight. The company sought client feedback and requirements to develop the platform with the multi-modal ability to handle OPI last year, VRI now, and future features that Klein characterized as the Star Wars of the VRI segment. If the platform performs as promised, it would contribute to building an ecosystem of services where users can pick interpreting modality within one application at the touch of a button.

Klein explained that LanguageLine will continue supporting LanguageUC, its installed VRI product delivered in partnership with Stratus Video, a VRI market leader. However, while InSight runs on mobile systems, PCs, and tablets, the Stratus product is PC- and tablet-centric. Our survey of VRI service buyers discovered that 41% of our sample access VRI via a computer. As software developers create more mobile-ready solutions, security encryption is vital, especially to fields such as health care and government. We expect the dependence on PC-based solutions to diminish in favor of smartphones and other wearables.

CSA Research is kicking off new primary research on interpreting technologies such as interpreting management systems (IMS), OPI platforms, and VRI solutions. If you have developed your own solution or are in the midst of doing so, please reach out to schedule a demo of your product so we can include it in our analysis of solutions.