Put down the receivers. Everyone already has a phone.

You know the routine, because you are the routine.

The receiver bin. The AAA batteries. The transmitter. The sign-out sheet. The volunteer who wipes forty earpieces and then spends greeting time handing out units — and the same volunteer, after the benediction, counting them back in and going to find the three that left in a coat pocket. If your church runs a radio interpretation system, somebody does all of that every single week, and it never shows up on an invoice. All of it goes away.

The part that does show up on an invoice is the hardware itself, and it is not small. We priced the popular receiver systems from the vendors' own listings — dated, with the street prices — in our receivers comparison. It also names, honestly, what that hardware still does better than phones. Read it before you decide anything; the numbers make the case better than adjectives would.

The receiver is the phone already in their pocket.

There's nothing to hand out and nothing to collect. No app, no account — the listener page is a plain web page, so it runs on old Androids and iPhones alike. And when the speaker cites a passage, the verse appears on each listener's screen in their own Bible translation, automatically. The setup takes about the length of a sound check. Browse the rest of the family — by language and by occasion — on the church-translation hub.

Some members don't carry a phone.

True, and a phone-based tool has to answer it instead of dodging it. The answer is Screens, included on every plan: styled live-caption displays, each with its own link and its own language. Put the main language on the projector so the whole room reads together. Put a second language on the lobby TV. Run a lower third over your livestream through OBS or ProPresenter. Members with phones get their own language privately; members without follow the shared screen — which also serves your deaf and hard-of-hearing members, and anyone straining to hear from the back row. A receiver never did either of those things.

We wrote up how churches actually arrange these displays — projector, lobby, livestream — in the screens field note.

Phone batteries, church Wi-Fi, old devices.

• No church Wi-Fi required. Each phone uses its own connection, and cell data works fine. Captions are text — they use very little of it. You don't have to build a guest network before your first service.
• The only battery is the one they charge anyway. The church stops owning a fleet of batteries. Nobody's service depends on whether the bin got plugged in the night before.
• Old devices are fine. The listener page is a web page, not an app — no store, no minimum OS version, no update mid-sermon. If the phone opens a browser, it follows the service.

What the hardware still does better.

We'd rather name this than pretend the trade doesn't exist. A dedicated receiver needs no phone at all, so it serves the member who doesn't carry one and won't follow a screen. It runs on its own radio, so it keeps working in a stone basement with no bars and no Wi-Fi — the one room where a phone-based tool genuinely struggles. And it's a one-time purchase: for a church that runs the same one or two languages for years on paid-off gear, the bin has a certain peace to it.

If that describes your building and your congregation, keep the receivers — they earn their keep, and the comparison says so with the cases named. Plenty of churches also run both for a season: the QR code for everyone with a phone, the bin for the handful who prefer a unit in hand. Nothing about VoxLive asks you to throw hardware away.

The interpreter comes with you.

Most receiver systems exist to carry one thing: a human interpreter's voice. That job moves to the phones whole. Your interpreter speaks, and their live voice goes to every listener who picks their channel — free and unmetered, on every plan. A human voice never consumes a spoken-language slot; the AI-voiced languages are what the paid tiers meter. So the person who has served your church for years keeps serving, with better reach than the bin ever gave them — and AI covers the languages nobody on the team speaks.

What it costs, without the hardware line item.

For context on the old model's recurring cost: a hired interpreter runs $50–150 an hour per language, so two languages across four services a month is $400–1,200 — and the receiver system only carries them; it never covers the language you have no human for. VoxLive's plans are flat, published, and all-inclusive: no per-language fees, no overage, no surprise bills. Paying annually gets you two months free, and the details live on the pricing page.

One scope note, so nobody is surprised mid-service: live translation covers the spoken parts of the service — sermon, prayer, announcements. Worship music and singing are not translated.

The homework, if you want it.

Translation without headsets, answered.