Data report · September 2026
State of live meeting translation, 2026
Published September 22, 2026 · Sample: 1,785 sessions, 653 installs · August 20, 2026 – September 21, 2026 · All times UTC
What do people actually do when they turn on live translated captions? We counted anonymous, aggregate usage from our browser extension: which languages they translate, on which platforms, for how long and at what time. This is the data from the users of one small extension, not the market — the limits are listed below, next to the method.
Key findings
- English is the spoken language in 64% of sessions. Most people translate an English meeting into their own language, not the other way round: only 17% of sessions translate into English.
- Almost one session in five does not involve English at all (18%), for example Japanese into Chinese or German into Spanish. By time, these sessions are 27% of the total.
- The top pairs by time are English into Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. English → Spanish is the most frequent pair by number of sessions (11%).
- Google Meet has the most sessions (34%), but Zoom sessions are the longest: a median of 5.4 minutes and a p90 of 52 minutes, against 2.3 and 21 on Meet.
- 22% of sessions are not in a meeting app at all — webinars, lectures, courses and other pages that play sound in a browser tab. YouTube and Twitch add 15% more.
- Use follows the working week. 84% of sessions happen Monday to Friday; the busiest UTC window is 12:00–18:00, when Europe’s afternoon overlaps the Americas’ morning.
- 48 languages were seen as spoken or target language, in 140 distinct pairs. 20 languages and 26 pairs are frequent enough to report on their own.
Direction: into English or from English
Share of the 1,442 sessions with a known language pair (September 3, 2026 – September 21, 2026), by number of sessions and by session time.
| Direction | Sessions | Time |
|---|---|---|
| From English into another language | 63% | 56% |
| Between two languages, neither of them English | 18% | 27% |
| From another language into English | 17% | 16% |
| English captions for English speech (no translation) | 1% | 0.2% |
| Same non-English language on both sides | 1% | 0.4% |
English is the language of the call far more often than the language of the reader. The typical session is a person who follows an English-language meeting and reads it in Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese or Russian.
Top language pairs
The ten largest pairs by session time, with their share of sessions. Only pairs with at least 10 sessions from at least 5 different installs are shown; 26 of the 140 pairs seen pass that bar.
| Spoken → captions in | Sessions | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| English → Chinese (Simplified) | 9% | ~28 |
| English → Portuguese (Brazil) | 8% | ~24 |
| English → Spanish | 11% | ~19 |
| Spanish → English | 3% | ~12 |
| English → Vietnamese | 4% | ~10 |
| English → Russian | 6% | ~8 |
| English → Portuguese (Portugal) | 2% | ~7 |
| English → Arabic | 3% | ~6 |
| English → Korean | 2% | ~5 |
| English → Italian | 3.5% | ~4 |
The long tail matters: the pairs too small to show on their own add up to 31% of sessions and 40% of the time. One heavy user can move a small pair by hours, which is the reason for the threshold.
Most frequent target languages, by share of sessions: English 18%, Spanish 14%, Russian 11%, Chinese (Simplified) 11%, Portuguese (Brazil) 9%, Vietnamese 5%, Arabic 4%, Italian 4%.
Platforms: Meet, Zoom, Teams and everything else
Share of all 1,785 sessions, and share of metered translation time (266 hours in total; the split by platform is available from September 7).
| Where the audio played | Sessions | Metered time |
|---|---|---|
| Google Meet | 34% | 36% |
| Other browser tabs (webinars, lectures, courses, unlisted sites) | 22% | 19% |
| Microsoft Teams (web) | 14% | 13% |
| Zoom (web client) | 13% | 24% |
| YouTube | 9% | 3% |
| Twitch | 6% | 3% |
| Other named sites (Weverse, WhatsApp Web, Jitsi, Webex and others, combined) | 3% | 2% |
Totals may not add up to 100% because of rounding. Zoom and Teams here mean the web clients in the browser; the desktop apps are not covered by the extension at all, so their real share of meetings is certainly higher than this table shows.
The second largest group is not a meeting app. More than one session in five is a webinar, an online lecture, a course or another page with sound. People use meeting translation for anything they need to follow live.
How long a session lasts
A session is one start–stop of translation. People pause and restart during a meeting, so one meeting often contains several sessions, and short test starts are included.
| Sessions | Median, min | p90, min |
|---|---|---|
| All sessions | 2.5 | 21 |
| Sessions of one minute or longer (68% of all) | 5 | 28 |
| Zoom | 5.4 | 52 |
| Microsoft Teams | 3.2 | 26 |
| Google Meet | 2.3 | 21 |
| Other browser tabs | 2.0 | 15 |
Zoom sessions are about twice as long as Meet sessions at the median and more than twice as long at the p90. More than half of all installs (56%) used translation more than once: the median install has 2 sessions, the p90 has 6.
Time of day and day of week (UTC)
Share of sessions in each three-hour window, UTC.
| UTC window | Sessions |
|---|---|
| 00:00–03:00 | 7% |
| 03:00–06:00 | 6% |
| 06:00–09:00 | 12% |
| 09:00–12:00 | 16% |
| 12:00–15:00 | 19% |
| 15:00–18:00 | 18% |
| 18:00–21:00 | 14% |
| 21:00–24:00 | 8% |
Average number of sessions on each day of the week over the period. Use grew during the period, which adds some noise to this comparison; the gap between weekdays and weekends is much larger than that effect.
| Day | Sessions per day |
|---|---|
| Monday | 69 |
| Tuesday | 74 |
| Wednesday | 70 |
| Thursday | 63 |
| Friday | 53 |
| Saturday | 34 |
| Sunday | 22 |
84% of sessions happen on weekdays. Live translation is mostly a work tool, used during working hours.
Method
- Source. The extension sends one anonymous event when a translation session ends: its length in seconds, the platform (a fixed list of sites, or “other”), and the spoken and target language. No audio, no captions text, no page address. Metered time comes from the server’s own per-day usage counter.
- Period. Sessions from August 20, 2026 to September 21, 2026. Language pairs are part of the event from September 3, 2026; platform split of metered time from September 7.
- What was removed. Our own test runs and test accounts (they are flagged when the row is written), automated requests and installs that are not a real Chrome or Edge browser, the demo page, the separate Trippi Cue product, and sessions of zero seconds. Only installs with metered usage in the period are counted.
- Privacy threshold. A number is shown only if it covers at least 10 sessions from at least 5 different installs. No per-person data, no countries. Percentages and hours are rounded.
Limits
- Users of one small extension, not the market. 653 installs is a small sample, and people who install a browser extension for meeting translation are not a random group of meeting participants.
- Browser only. Desktop Zoom and Teams apps are invisible here, which understates both platforms.
- Heavy users weigh a lot in hours. The ten most active installs account for about a third of all session time. Shares of sessions are more stable than hours; both are given.
- Short, growing period. About five weeks, in a period when the number of users was growing. Seasonality, holidays and long-term trends are not visible.
- A session is not a meeting. Restarts split one meeting into several sessions, and sessions include moments with no speech on the tab.
We plan to update this page once a quarter. Questions about the data: contact us.
How to cite
About Trippi
Trippi is a browser extension for Chrome and Edge that shows live captions with a translation under each line for any tab with sound — Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams on the web, webinars and lectures. No bot joins the call. It does not work in the desktop Zoom or Teams apps. More: features, live translated captions in Zoom, Meet and Teams compared, pricing.
Frequently asked questions
What is this data?+
Anonymous, aggregate usage events from the Trippi browser extension, which shows live translated captions for audio playing in a browser tab. The sample is 1,785 finished sessions from 653 installs between August 20, 2026 and September 21, 2026. Language pairs are available from September 3, 2026 (1,442 sessions).
Does it represent the whole market?+
No. It describes the users of one small extension that works in the browser only. Desktop Zoom and Teams apps, built-in platform captions, human interpreters and other tools are not in it. Read it as a signal about how people use live translation, not as market share.
Which language pair is most common in live meeting translation?+
In this sample, English → Spanish has the most sessions (11%), and English → Chinese (Simplified) has the most time (about 28 hours). Most sessions translate from English into another language.
Which platform do people translate most: Meet, Zoom or Teams?+
Google Meet has the most sessions (34%), then Microsoft Teams (14%) and Zoom (13%). By metered time, Zoom is second (24%) because its sessions are longer. 22% of sessions are in other browser tabs such as webinars and lectures.
How long is a live translation session?+
The median session is 2.5 minutes and the p90 is 21 minutes. For sessions of at least one minute the median is 5 minutes and the p90 is 28. A session is one start–stop of translation, so a single meeting can contain several.
Can I quote these numbers?+
Yes. Please cite “Trippi, State of live meeting translation, 2026” with a link to https://gettrippi.app/en/state-of-meeting-translation/, and keep the sample size and date range next to the number.