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Use Case
School District Meetings & Citizen Engagement
Audience
Local Community
Languages
English Spanish
Summary
Today, California is home to over 16M residents of Hispanic origin, making up a whopping 40% of its total population. To ensure that citizen engagement in council and school district meetings are equally accessible to this community, a large Unified School District in California came to KUDO in 2024 to find a scalable and reliable live speech translation solution. The district also sought a solution to comply with ADA rules regarding the provision of closed captions or assistive listening for those with a hearing impairment.
The Challenge
Like many others in the area, this large Californian school district runs monthly board meetings with the community. Since the average duration of these meetings is 4-5 hours, which can on occasion run late into the night, the district needed a scalable and flexible language accessibility solution that would allow them to run these in-person meetings in multiple languages with closed captions – particularly for citizens from a Hispanic background.
Having tried human interpretation previously, their team found the quality of speech translation high, but there were not enough interpreters available at such late hours or occasionally at such short notice to interpret the meetings. The school district tested KUDO AI Speech Translator as an alternative solution, which promised the highest quality translation of audio and captions on the market, available 24/7 on-demand for any meeting duration.
Services Provided
Department of Education | Californian School District
The Solution
Since successfully testing KUDO AI for their meetings, this Californian School District has now rolled out live speech translation and closed captions for all school district meetings. Attendees can scan any of the QR codes printed in the meeting room to access KUDO AI on their smartphones or tablets directly in a new browser, with no downloads or accounts needed. This allows citizens to engage with policymakers in the language of their choice, while conforming to ADA compliance rules regarding the provision of assistive listening for persons with a hearing impairment.
KUDO AI has now become a permanent and key fixture in their school district meetings, with the team reporting increased engagement and inclusion from constituents.
Make your communication accessible in any language with KUDO
Get in touch and see how you can add live speech translation and captions to your meetings and events – human or AI – on any device or platform.
