Ask These Questions Before Choosing an AI Interpreting Solution: A Buyer’s Checklist

“I’ve got to be honest with you. What if the AI interpreter tells the person the wrong medicine?” a healthcare administrator asked us that on a call last week. That is the perfect question to start with, and many have this same concern. Our new AI interpreting in healthcare report found that 59% of healthcare leaders said that “trust that it will work in real conversations” is their biggest barrier to adopting AI.

We hear some version of that question constantly, on sales calls, in demos, in the follow-up email a week later, when someone’s still turning it over. After sitting through close to 100  conversations, we noticed a pattern in the concerns that kept surfacing: will the AI interpreter actually work, what will it cost, what happens when it doesn’t work, will it fit how we already operate, and is our data safe? 

Let’s answer these questions directly, the way we would if you asked us yourself. 

Why Evaluate AI Interpreting Now

The interpreting industry is under pressure. More than 25 million people in the U.S. have limited English proficiency, and 11 million are Deaf or Hard of hearing. With language access demand at an all-time high, the supply of interpreters is also shrinking, creating a squeeze on both interpreter quality and coverage.

For many who need interpreting day to day, budgets are getting tighter, and there’s a lot of pressure to adopt AI to improve operations. Boostlingo’s healthcare report found that 1 in 5 healthcare leaders would use AI interpreting immediately, but that number jumps to 3 in 4 after waiting 5 minutes for a human interpreter.

Whatever your reason is for reviewing AI interpreting, you need to trust that the AI works, creates results, and is a long-term solution. With that as the goal, here are the questions you should ask before choosing an AI interpreting solution:

Does AI Interpreting Work in Real Conversations?

You want proof, not a pitch: how an AI interpreter handles your specific terminology, whether it picks up on tone, whether it can manage language that doesn’t translate cleanly from one culture to another. And you want to know whether people will actually use it. An accuracy score means nothing if your staff quietly work around the tool because nobody yet trusts it.

Here’s Boostlingo’s approach. Our AI Interpreter is graded the same way a human interpreter would be, on accuracy, professionalism, and flow, scored by AI judges and combined into one number. It delivers accuracy that outperforms leading commercial and open-source systems, and it’s built on a large medical and legal terminology database, with room for you to load your own glossary.

Learn how Boostlingo compares AI Interpreting accuracy in real conditions.

On the adoption side, we’re seeing about a high acceptance rate, and in some settings, like OBGYN visits, we’re hearing that patients actually prefer AI because there’s no extra person listening in.

One final thing, how you use AI interpreting impacts its performance. Check out our article on best practices for working with AI to learn how you can get more out of the tool.

What’s This Going to Cost?

The real worry usually isn’t the sticker price. It’s getting stuck paying for minutes you never use, locked into a contract sized for volume you don’t have.

With us, AI can be up to 42% cheaper per minute than a human interpreter, and you’re billed pay-as-you-go: nothing for having it on your account, nothing if you don’t touch it that month. Test and determine where AI fits into your language access plan. Use it for even 10% of your volume, and you unlock a discount that scales with your usage.

Visit our pricing page to receive a customized quote showing your potential savings.

What Happens When AI Doesn’t Work?

AI interpreting is ready to handle real conversations, but what happens when it doesn’t work? When an AI interpreter is in use, you need to be able to access a human interpreter mid-call without hanging up and starting over. This ensures continuity in the conversation.

Another thing to consider, should AI interpreting even be in the room for certain, more sensitive conversations like medical consent or a legal proceeding?

With Boostlingo, every AI session has a rollover built in: one tap connects you to a live human interpreter in the same call, and if your own interpreters are available first, the call goes to them before it ever reaches our network. Our human interpreters receive training to handle AI rollover calls as well to support a consistent experience.

Where AI fits is your decision, but we recommend: AI handles the routine, low-stakes conversations, and a human stays in the room for anything high-stakes. If your policy says no AI for a certain kind of conversation, we build to that boundary instead of arguing you out of it.

Our AI Implementation guide walks you through how to responsibly roll out the tool.

Will AI Fit Into Our Workflow?

You need to know which languages are covered, how they perform, and whether they plug into what you’re already running: Zoom, your EHR, your phone system. If it means new hardware or a six-month IT project, it’s not worth testing, no matter how good the underlying tech is.

Our AI Interpreter currently supports 23 languages. Every language we release has gone through our own testing with human linguists, not a translation model’s default output. Outside those 23, you have human interpreters in more than 300 languages, available around the clock. Our AI Interpreter is device-agnostic. Whether you use a tablet, a phone, a laptop, or a plain phone call with a PIN, with integrations into Zoom, Teams, and EHR systems, athenahealth, or EPIC and Cerner through HL7, our solution works.

View our up-to-date language list and integrations.

Is Our Data Safe?

If you’re in government, legal, or healthcare, you need transparency about your data security: where does the data go, is it HIPAA compliant, and does any of it end up training a model somewhere?

We’re HIPAA compliant, and we don’t use your audio, transcripts, or summaries to train any model. We also don’t record by default; session data gets purged unless you opt in for quality review, and we’ll sign a Business Associate Agreement if you need one.

Learn more about our data handling and privacy in Boostlingo’s trust center.

Talk to Boostlingo

You’ll have questions beyond these, but these five come up on nearly every call we take, across every industry we work with. Ask them to us, and ask them about any other provider you’re talking to.

Read our article on 4 AI Interpreting Providers to learn about a few of the providers on the market.

If you want the actual metrics and success indicators to score those answers against, not just take someone’s word for it, our full Buyer’s Guide to AI Interpreting breaks each of these down category by category. Download it here, or talk to our team to see the accuracy scoring and rollover for yourself.