Chat-Style Live Translation — A Vertical Messages View
May 2026
Live Translate Live has always shown a conversation as a horizontal scrolling marquee — two streams of text gliding across the screen, one row per speaker, like subtitles for real life. The marquee is still the headline view, and for a lot of situations it is exactly the right shape: face-to-face seated dialogue, a TV across the room, a browser source piped into OBS for a stream.
But scrolling text has one obvious property — it scrolls. A sentence you missed is gone, drifted off the left edge, and there is no scrubbing back. Several readers asked us for the same thing in different words: can the conversation just sit there? Like a chat app. Bubbles that stay on screen, newest at the bottom, with the option to scroll back into the past.
That view shipped this month. It is not a replacement for the marquee — both are live, both run on the same engine, and you can switch between them mid-conversation. It is just a different layout for the same translation, optimised for reading along instead of glancing across.
A Second Live View, Not a Replay
The thing to get out of the way first: this is not "history" in the old sense of the word. There used to be a separate page where you could go look at past conversations after the fact. That page still exists, and it now does double duty — when your microphone is on, the same screen is the live view. New translation arrives in real time, lands at the bottom as a fresh chat bubble, and stays there.
Underneath, nothing has changed. The same Deepgram speech recognition runs in two parallel streams — one for your language, one for theirs. The same Google Cloud translation handles the conversion. The same simultaneous two-way translation means both people speak at natural pace without taking turns. All 47 supported languages work in either layout.
What changes is geometry. The marquee uses horizontal motion to convey "this is happening now." The chat view uses vertical stacking to convey "this is what was said, and the new stuff lands at the bottom." Different intuitions about time, same underlying data.
How the Chat Layout Works
Open the chat view and a microphone session works the way you would expect from any messenger app. Bubbles stack vertically, newest at the bottom. You get one colour; them gets another, with a small label chip on each bubble so it stays clear who said what. The view scrolls itself as new bubbles arrive so you do not have to chase the bottom edge — but you can scroll up freely without breaking the live feed.
A bubble is a sentence, not a fragment. While a speaker is mid-sentence, their current bubble updates in place — words appearing as the recognizer finalises them, like watching someone type. When the sentence ends, the bubble is finalised and the next sentence opens a new bubble underneath. The boundary is detected two ways: a "burst end" signal from the speech engine when the speaker hits a natural break, or a fallback timeout after about three seconds of silence. Either way you end up with one bubble per thought, which is what you want when you scroll back through the conversation later.
Translations stream in slightly behind the original. While the translation is in flight, you see Translating… in italic underneath the original sentence. When it lands, the placeholder is replaced. There is no awkward delay where the bubble looks broken — you always know whether you are waiting on the translator or whether something genuinely failed.
Past conversations are right there too. Scroll up, and older sessions load in pages of fifty messages at a time, automatically, the way an infinite-scroll chat history works. There is no separate archive page or import step. The conversation you had this morning, last week, last month — all stacked above the live one, ready to scroll back to.
Push-to-Talk works exactly like it does on the marquee — hold the button, talk, release. The same TAP AND HOLD TO TALK overlay appears, the same noisy-environment behaviour applies. The chat view does not change anything about how the microphone behaves; only how the result lands on your screen.
The Translation-Only Toggle
The signature UX move in the chat view is small and easy to miss until you try it: tap any finalised bubble and the source language collapses away. The bubble keeps only the translation, surfaced in the primary text weight, and the small chip label updates to show which language you are now reading — for example, YOU (SPANISH) instead of YOU.
Tap again and the source comes back, with the translation sitting beneath it as a secondary line. There is no menu, no settings dive — the bubble itself is the toggle. We call it translation-only mode internally, and when it is on, the whole conversation reads as a single language stream, the way it would if you were a fluent speaker hearing the room directly.
The setting is sticky. Once you toggle it, every bubble in the conversation switches with you, and the choice is remembered across sessions and devices — open the app on your phone tomorrow and it stays in whichever mode you left it. Untoggle to get back to the side-by-side view whenever you want both languages on screen again.
Two patterns we have seen people fall into, both of which the toggle was designed for:
- Reading what was said to you, in your language, without the source distracting. If you are the English speaker in an English ↔ Spanish conversation and only need the English half of every bubble, translation-only with English as the displayed language gives you a clean transcript of the meeting in your own words.
- Drilling comprehension in a language you are learning. Flip on translation-only, set it to display the target language instead of yours, and the chat becomes a stream of native-speaker-style sentences in the language you are studying. Pair it with the techniques in our piece on language learning with live translation for a low-pressure listening loop.
Who It Is For
We did not build the chat view with one specific persona in mind, and the request that prompted it came from several different directions at once. Four use-cases keep recurring in reader email:
Language Learners
This is the most enthusiastic group. The marquee scrolls too fast to study — you cannot sit with a sentence and reread it. The chat view is the opposite: bubbles sit there until you scroll past them. Combine that with the translation-only toggle set to your target language, and you have an infinite, self-paced stream of comprehensible input drawn from a real conversation you were already going to have. Scroll back to a sentence you missed, copy a phrase you want to drill later, take your time.
Family Conversations
Multigenerational families with a language gap — a grandparent who speaks Cantonese, a grandchild who speaks English, a parent who half-speaks both — get a particular benefit from bubbles that wait. An older speaker who needs a moment to assemble a sentence ends up with their full thought sitting on screen, intact, even if the listener glanced away mid-sentence. Nobody has to ask anyone to repeat themselves. The conversation has a record while it is happening, not just after.
Business Meetings & Appointments
For meetings — a sales call, a vendor conversation, a doctor's appointment, an immigration interview — the chat view is closer to the transcript people actually want. You can refer back to what was said three minutes ago without breaking the flow. After the meeting ends, you have a complete record on screen, in both languages, ready to read or hand to whoever needs it. For high-stakes situations a certified interpreter is still the right call, but for the long tail of routine bilingual meetings, having the conversation captured in chat form is genuinely useful.
Accessibility & Hearing
Captions that vanish in one second are a hostile interface for anyone whose listening is effortful. Whether the reader is hard of hearing, in a noisy environment, or just processes spoken language a beat slower than the room, the chat layout gives them captions that stay. No pressure to catch every word the first time. If you missed it, scroll up. This is the same instinct behind same-language transcription mode — captions you can read at your own speed, not the speaker's.
Marquee vs. Chat — Which to Use
Both views are live. Both bill the same. Both run on the same translation engine. The choice between them is mostly about the room you are in and the kind of reading you want to do.
| Marquee (scrolling) | Chat (vertical messages) | |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | Horizontal, two rows, text scrolling right-to-left | Vertical, stacked bubbles, newest at the bottom |
| Persistence | Scrolls past — once it leaves the screen, it's gone | Stays — scroll back as far as you want, into past sessions too |
| Bubble unit | Continuous text stream | One sentence per bubble, finalised on a natural break |
| Best for | Face-to-face seated dialogue, TV / projector, OBS browser source, vis-à-vis mode | Solo-screen reading, language practice, meetings, accessibility |
| Interaction | Read-only, ambient | Tap any bubble to toggle translation-only mode |
| History | Lives elsewhere — scroll back later in the chat view | Built in — old conversations sit above the new one |
Two quick rules of thumb: if you and the other person are sharing one screen — a TV, a laptop on a table between you, a phone propped up — the marquee is probably the right call, and vis-à-vis mode makes it work for opposite seating. If you are looking at the screen by yourself — a phone in your hand at the doctor's, a tablet in your lap during a video call, a laptop open during a meeting — the chat view will read better.
You do not have to commit. The two views share the same session and the same bubbles underneath. Switch mid-conversation; nothing is lost.
Same Engine, Same Pricing
No new tier, no upgrade, no separate billing. The chat view costs the same as the marquee — about $1 for 15 minutes of two-way translation, $3 for an hour, no subscription, credits never expire. You only pay when audio is actively being transcribed and translated. Reading back through past conversations costs nothing. Scrolling up through last week's chat is free.
If you mostly want a reviewable transcript and not a full second translation pipeline, same-language mode works in the chat view too — set both languages the same, and credits stretch about ten times further because there is no second translation step.
FAQ
Is this a new feature, or a redesign of the old history page?
Both. The page that used to be a static archive of past conversations is now a live view as well. Open it with your microphone on and new translation arrives at the bottom in real time. Open it with the microphone off and it behaves the way it always did — a record of past sessions, scrollable. Same URL, same data, expanded behaviour.
Does the chat view cost more than the marquee?
No. It is the same engine billed at the same rate. If you switch from the marquee to the chat view mid-session, your credit usage continues at exactly the same pace. There is no premium tier for chat-style display.
Can I use Push-to-Talk in the chat view?
Yes. Push-to-Talk works the same way in either layout — hold the button, talk, release. The chat view shows the same TAP AND HOLD TO TALK overlay you are used to. PTT is especially useful in the chat view for noisy environments where you want explicit control over what gets transcribed and what does not.
What happens to old conversations? Can I get to them?
Old conversations are stacked above the live one. Scroll up and the chat view loads older sessions in pages, infinite-scroll style. You do not need to know a date or open an archive — just scroll. The translation-only toggle applies retroactively too, so if you flip into translation-only mode and scroll back to a conversation from last month, it shows the translated side of those bubbles, not the original.
Can I switch between the marquee and the chat view mid-conversation?
Yes. Both views are powered by the same live session, so swapping between them does not interrupt your microphone, drop bubbles, or restart anything underneath. Pick whichever layout fits the moment — read-along chat for a doctor's appointment, scrolling marquee for the dinner table afterwards — and switch as the room changes.
Try It
The chat view is live now for every account. Open Live Translate Live, sign in, and look for the conversation history page — your microphone session will land there in chat form automatically. Tap a bubble to try translation-only mode. Scroll up to see how far back your past conversations go.
Try for $1 — no subscription · See all features · Pricing