AI Interpreter Workbench

boostlingo: Realtime vs Cascade

Live speech interpretation, implemented two ways and measured head-to-head on real medical audio — 8 language directions, 8 configurations, 61 runs.

Conclusion

While OpenAI Realtime is a remarkable technology and very easy to set up and use, it is rarely the best option for real life interpretation. It did do slightly better on accuracy and latency, but these are things that should be studied when building a cascade system. Realtime costs dramatically more, and can get confused and distracted, which would be a very poor experience in real life. Realtime should be used for benchmarking and testing prototype products and a measurement on how to build the best cascade pipeline.

See full report The measured comparison — charts, all 8 configurations, all 8 directions, and what we learned. Go to Interpreter Workbench Try all three live modes yourself — Realtime direct, Realtime relay, and the swappable cascade.