Translate BigBlueButton — live, in your language.

BigBlueButton’s captions depend on the speaker — and never translate.

BigBlueButton does have automatic captions, and they work in an unusual way: they use the speaker’s own browser speech recognition, which means the person talking has to switch it on and choose the language themselves. If the lecturer does not, there are no captions for anyone. And either way there is no translation — the text appears in the language being spoken. Translation exists only as a community project, bbb-translation-bot, which someone has to install on the institution’s own server.

A student cannot deploy a bot

The realistic path to translated BigBlueButton captions today runs through the IT department: install the translation bot, run a speech model next to it, give it resources, keep it alive. That is a project, with a budget and an owner, and it is not something an exchange student can arrange before Thursday’s seminar.

Trippi needs nothing from the institution. It runs in the browser the student already has, on the tab the class is already in, and the server never learns about it.

It works when the lecturer forgets

Because BigBlueButton captions are switched on by the speaker, the most common failure is simply that nobody did. Trippi does not depend on that: it recognises the room audio directly, so it produces the same result whether the lecturer enabled captions, chose the wrong language, or never touched the setting.

Keeping the recognised original above the translation is worth it in a lecture — terminology, formulas read aloud and proper names are exactly where machine translation drifts, and the original line is how you catch it.

What you need to start

• The BigBlueButton room open in a browser tab — it has no desktop app, so this is always the case.
• No access to the server, no bot, no help from IT.
• The language you hear and the language you want to read.
• The free tier gives 25 minutes of live translation a month, with no card and no account.