What an Interpreter Costs When You Are Not a Company

Professional interpreting has always been sold to organizations. A hospital signs a contract. A court has a vendor. A company has an account manager and a rate card nobody outside the building ever sees.

So if you are one person with a conversation you cannot have on your own, the honest answer to “what does an interpreter cost” has usually been that you cannot buy one at all.

That has changed, and the prices are worth putting in public.

The short version

• AI interpretation: $0.25 a minute. Instant, 70+ languages.
• A live professional interpreter: $1.25 a minute for Spanish, $1.75 for other languages. 80+ languages.
• You are billed only while the call is connected, rounded up to the whole minute. If no interpreter joins within three minutes, the call ends and you pay nothing.

What the numbers mean in practice

Per-minute pricing is hard to feel until you put it against a real conversation. Three ordinary ones:

The conversation	Length	Mode	What it costs
Asking a landlord to reschedule a repair	6 min	Human, Spanish	$7.50
Confirming an appointment time	3 min	AI	$0.75
Sorting out a billing error with a utility	12 min	Human, other language	$21.00

A twenty-dollar credit pack covers a good deal of everyday life. That is the point of publishing the numbers rather than asking you to request a quote.

How the billing actually works

Four things worth knowing before your first call, because they are where per-minute pricing usually gets uncomfortable:

• Billing starts when the call connects, not when you open the app or pick a language.
• Minutes are rounded up to the next whole minute. A call lasting four minutes and ten seconds is billed as five.
• If no interpreter joins within three minutes, the call ends and you are not charged. You do not pay to wait.
• Credit does not expire. You buy it in packs of $5, $10, $25 or $100 through Google Play, and it sits there until a call uses it.

There is no subscription required and no contract. You download the app, add credit, and talk.

The optional monthly plan

If you are using it often, VoCo Pro is $29.99 a month. It makes AI interpretation unlimited, includes the email transcripts of AI calls that otherwise cost $1.99 each, and lowers the human interpreter rate to $1.00 a minute for Spanish and $1.50 for other languages.

It is worth it only at real volume. On the pay-as-you-go rates, $29.99 buys about 120 minutes of AI interpretation or 24 minutes with a Spanish interpreter, so Pro makes sense if you are past that most months and not before. You manage or cancel it through Google Play.

Choosing between AI and a person

The two modes cost very differently and they are for different things.

AI interpretation is machine interpretation. It is instant, it is five times cheaper than a human, and it is right for the everyday exchange: the hotel desk, the delivery driver, the quick question at a counter. It is not a professional interpreter and should not be treated as one.

A live professional interpreter is a person who does this for a living, joining your call by voice. That is what you want when the conversation carries weight, when a detail matters, or when being misunderstood would cost you something. Availability varies by language and by time of day.

You choose on each call, so the expensive option is only expensive when you decide you need it.

What it does not do

Being straight about the limits, because a pricing article that only lists prices is a sales page:

• Android only. VoCo runs on Android 8.0 or later through Google Play. There is no iPhone app today.
• Human interpreter availability varies by language and time of day. Spanish is the most widely covered.
• Transcripts are for AI calls only, emailed after the call on request, $1.99 each or included with Pro.
• It is a consumer app. If you are an organization that needs interpreting for regulated settings, scheduled appointments, or an interpreter on site, that is a different service and VoCo is not it. MultiLingual Technologies does that work under contract, and that conversation starts here.

Getting started

Download VoCo on Google Play, add a credit pack, choose your language, and pick AI or a human interpreter. The first call takes a couple of minutes to set up, and the app needs microphone access to interpret.

VoCo is built by MultiLingual Technologies, a language services company in Santa Clara that provides translation and professional interpreting to organizations every day. VoCo is the part we built so that it is not only organizations who can reach an interpreter.

See VoCo, including the full pricing

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Sources

All figures read from the live VoCo product page on 29 October 2026, and cross-checked against `config/products.yaml` (pricing verified by Jon 2026-09-21, language counts corrected against the live page and Frank’s launch brief 2026-10-12).

• VoCo product page, including the full pricing table and FAQ: https://www.multilingual-tech.com/products/voco/
• VoCo on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.multilinguaTechnologies.voco