Hayward Staff Rehearse AI Translation Tool to Open Council Meetings to Spanish Speakers

Hayward city staff spent an entire session testing Wordly, an AI-powered live translation platform, ahead of its planned deployment at City Council meetings. The rehearsal surfaced key technical lessons — from audio-echo problems to language-detection delays — and drew advice from the City of Sunnyvale, which already uses the tool.

• Hayward prepares real-time Spanish-English translation for council meetings, aiming to let residents speak and follow proceedings in their language

• Staff identify workarounds for detection delays and audio-echo issues during live testing with remote and in-person Spanish speakers

• Sunnyvale shares its playbook, including free OBS Studio software to composite translation feeds into a single video stream

• Wordly will be standing by at every meeting but activated on-screen only when a language-access request comes in

Hayward is preparing to replace the traditional pause-and-translate model of public comment — where a Spanish-speaking resident speaks, stops, and waits for an interpreter to relay the message — with a system that translates in real time. The tool at the center of the effort is Wordly, an AI platform that listens to spoken input in one language and produces written (and spoken) output in another.