ByteDance’s LiveInterpret 2.0 interprets Chinese-English simultaneously in your own voice
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2025-07-24 ByteDance’s Seed team released Seed LiveInterpret 2.0, an end-to-end speech-to-speech simultaneous interpretation model for Chinese<->English that speaks the translation in the speaker’s cloned voice about 2.5-3 s behind.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Latency: ~2.21 s first-word (speech-to-text) and ~2.53 s (speech-to-speech), which ByteDance says is 60-70% lower than cascaded systems (down from nearly 10 s)
- Accuracy: >70% in multi-speaker and >80% in single-speaker settings; human-eval score 74.8/100 (speech-to-text) vs 47.3 for the runner-up baseline; 66.3/100 speech-to-speech
- Real-time zero-shot voice cloning of each speaker; large-scale pretraining plus reinforcement learning to trade accuracy against latency
- Paper: arXiv 2507.17527 ‘Seed LiveInterpret 2.0: End-to-end Simultaneous Speech-to-speech Translation with Your Voice’
- Available on Volcano Engine (Ark console, ‘Doubao - Simultaneous Interpretation 2.0’); planned for ByteDance’s Ola Friend earbuds from end of Aug 2025. Public API model id and pricing not verified
What happened
ByteDance replaced the usual ASR -> MT -> TTS cascade with a single end-to-end model that listens, translates and speaks at the same time, and renders each speaker’s translation in their own cloned voice.
Why it matters
It was one of the first product-grade end-to-end simultaneous interpreters. It came roughly ten months before OpenAI’s gpt-realtime-translate (May 2026), Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (June 2026) and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate (Sept 2026). All accuracy figures are ByteDance’s own evaluations. It covers only Chinese and English.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 primary
Primary
- ByteDance Seed blog - Seed LiveInterpret 2.0 releasedseed.bytedance.com, official
- arXiv 2507.17527 - Seed LiveInterpret 2.0 technical reportarxiv.org, paper
- Volcano Engine console - simultaneous interpretation democonsole.volcengine.com, docs
Changes
- Filed