FAQ
The questions people actually ask
Including the awkward ones. If yours is not here, ask it and we will answer it and probably add it.
Getting started
Is it ready, and how do we begin
- How mature is it?
- It is a working product, tested and in use, and you can start on it today. It began as Turnstone, a proof of concept that was developed into a working system and has since moved into C2 Discovery Labs CIC. My Words is that same system, rebranded. Development continues: speech in and out, document translation and more languages are next.
- How do we actually sign up?
- Today, by asking. Registration, login and GoCardless payment are being built and will be self-service when they are done. Nothing about the product itself waits on that: the application is working now and we can have you on it without it.
- Do we have to install anything?
- No. It runs in the browser you already have, on the machines you already use. The other person installs nothing and creates no account: either they read the shared screen, or they open a single link on their own phone.
- How long does it take to set up?
- An individual account is minutes. An organization is a short piece of work: accounts, group settings, languages, templates and a briefing for staff on what the score markers mean and when to stop and book an interpreter.
Cost and terms
What it costs and what you are committing to
- What does it cost?
- A single-worker plan and three organization tiers. The numbers are on the pricing page.
- Is there a contract or a minimum term?
- No. Every plan is rolling month to month and you can cancel at any time, including the organization tiers. There is no notice period and no exit fee. We would rather keep a service because it is useful than because it is locked in.
- How can we pay?
- Payments run through GoCardless: a monthly Direct Debit on any plan, or a one-off bank payment where your finance team would rather pay a period up front. Invoice and purchase order work on any of the organization tiers. We never see or hold your bank details.
- What if we outgrow a tier?
- Move up from the next month. Nobody gets locked out mid-conversation for crossing a seat count, and you can move back down again just as easily.
- Is the price going to jump once you are established?
- On a rolling plan we can only ever change a price going forward, and you would be told before the month it applied to rather than finding it on an invoice. If it is not worth the new price you stop, which is the point of not tying you in.
- Does this replace our interpreter budget?
- No, and a business case built on that basis is one we will argue against. It is for conversations that currently have no interpreter at all. The safeguards page lists the conversations you should still be booking an interpreter for, and it is deliberately conservative.
- Can you give us a return-on-investment figure?
- Not one we made up. Nobody has independently measured this yet and the academic validation is still being arranged. What we can give you is the arithmetic and your own transcripts and scores from day one, which is what the business case page sets out.
Data and information governance
What happens to what people say
- Where does conversation content go?
- Translating a conversation means sending its content to a hosted language model. That is inherent to how the product works and cannot be switched off, so conversation content leaves your systems in the course of being translated. It is also stored so the exchange can be reviewed and audited. The privacy page sets this out in full.
- Our information governance will not allow that. Is that the end of it?
- Tell us at the start. It is a genuine constraint for some services and an open question we are working on, and we would rather hear it than argue with it.
- Can we self-host it?
- Not today. The application is an ordinary PHP and MariaDB web stack, so the hosting is not the hard part; the translation calls to a hosted language model are.
- What does it record about the person being helped?
- What they wrote and its translation, the facts recorded about the conversation, and attributes such as age band and gender where these were entered, declared or picked up from what was said. Those attributes are used to choose correct referring terms in the target language. They are visible to the worker and can be corrected.
- Who is the data controller?
- For a conversation held in your service, you are. It is your conversation and your duty of care, and we support you in answering anything that arises from it.
What it does
How well it works, and where it stops
- How accurate is it?
- Accuracy varies by language, by domain and by how clearly the source was expressed, so the system scores each turn and shows you that score. A single headline figure covering every language and every conversation would be close to meaningless.
- Which languages?
- Forty, covering European languages and the indigenous languages of these islands, including Welsh and Scottish Gaelic. Non-Latin scripts, including Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Somali, Farsi and Mandarin, are the next block of work. The full list is on the languages page.
- Does it do speech?
- Not yet. Today both people type. Speech to text and text to speech are being built, along with document translation.
- Where should we not use it?
- Statutory assessments and decisions, legal proceedings and advice, clinical consultation and consent, formal safeguarding interviews, and any conversation where an error would be hard to reverse. The safeguards page is the full statement and is written to be handed to staff as it stands.
- What happens when it is not sure?
- If a translation scores below threshold it rewrites it before the other person sees it. If the source itself is ambiguous it asks the speaker a specific question in their own language instead of picking an interpretation. Where no score exists for a turn, nothing is shown.
Not answered here
Ask us the one that is missing
Particularly if it is a question you need answered before you could put this in front of a manager. Those are the ones worth adding.