Live Consular AI Language Augmentation (LCALA) - Visa Interview Pilot

Overview

Development stage

PilotSource: b) Pilot – The use case has been deployed in a limited test or pilot capacity.

High-impact designation

High-impactSource: a) High-impact

Impact justification

Not reported

Start date

2025-03-17 (day precision)Source: 03/17/2025 00:00:00

Withheld from public reporting

NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area

Other

Operational functions

Translation and transcription, Public-facing customer service Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

Language gaps between applicants and non-native-speaker adjudicators create inconsistent, ad-hoc translation during brief (~3-minute) interviews or is limited to questions the adjudicator is familiar with asking, increasing the risk of misunderstanding (dialect/register, pronouns, named entities) and forcing repeat questions, delays, or uneven outcomes. Interpreter availability is limited, and reliance on bilingual staff is not scalable to demand and will impact other consular functions. These constraints reduce interview efficiency, strain officer workload, and can erode customer experience and perceived equity.

Expected benefits

More consistent comprehension in ~3-minute interviews; Improved efficiency and throughput; Equity and customer experience; Reduced interpreter burden; Operational resilience

System outputs

LCALA provides real-time transcription and neural machine translation of spoken exchanges at the interview window, delivering translated audio and on-screen text on the device; when enabled, it can generate a brief time-stamped transcript of the conversation.

Technology

AI classification

Natural language processingSource: Natural Language Processing: AI that processes, interprets, and shares information in human language.

System name(s)

Not reported

Custom-developed code

No

Public source code

Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built

Purchased from vendorSource: a) Purchased from a vendor

Vendor (as reported)

Microsoft

Vendors (standardized)

Microsoft

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII

No

Privacy Impact Assessment

Not reported

Authorization to Operate

No

Demographic features

k) None of the above

Training and evaluation data

LCALA uses Microsoft’s vendor-managed Speech-to-Text and Neural Machine Translation models, which are trained and fine-tuned on large, proprietary multilingual speech/text corpora and evaluated with standard metrics (e.g., WER for speech; BLEU/ChrF/COMET with human review for translation). No Department of State audio or transcripts are used to train or fine-tune these models (no-trace processing). For this pilot, the team performs limited operational Quality Assurance (e.g., sampled named-entity accuracy, latency, officer re-ask rates) to evaluate performance in the visa-interview context.

Federal Data Catalog

Not reported

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported