AI Carried 189 Languages Across UNCCD's Global Pastoralist Gathering In Mongolia: Real-Time Translation with Omnio

International gatherings run on one basic assumption: that everyone in the room can follow what's being said. That assumption breaks down fast once delegates arrive from dozens of countries at once. The usual fix is human interpreter booths, which are expensive to staff at scale, limited to whichever languages an organizer can afford to book, and unable to follow a conversation once it moves outside the main hall, into a smaller working session, a field visit, or a side conversation. 

The Global Pastoralist Gathering and Conference held in Mongolia from 9 to 15 August 2026, jointly organized by Mongolia's Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Light Industry and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization ran into this problem at full scale. Roughly 400 people took part, about 240 international delegates from 102 countries, 100 Mongolian pastoralists, and 60 government and national representatives and took part in discussions spread across six provinces and a formal plenary, with no language shared by the room as a whole. 

The event ran in multiple parts from field-visits across Mongolian provinces, meeting herder households, drafting the Women's, Youth, and General Pastoralists' Declarations and delegates reconvening again at Ulaanbaatar, where Mongolia's Minister of Food, Agriculture and Light Industry, the FAO's Assistant Director-General, and UNCCD's Executive Secretary opened the plenary sessions and three were finalized and adopted, ahead of their presentation at UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar.

acAIberry, a Nepal based AI and Technology company supplied the interpretation layer that let a conference this spread out function as one conversation.

Omnio, acAIberry's real-time multilingual interpretation platform, was deployed where participants opened it on their own phones, chose a language from a catalogue of 189, and listened to a live translation. Whether that was a herder household meeting in Bulgan or the plenary floor in Ulaanbaatar. 

Omnio picks up speech, transcribes it, detects the source language, translates it, and returns it as text and spoken audio, while an operator dashboard tracks the live transcript and audience status in the background. Across the four operational days, the scale of that conversation shows up plainly in the production numbers. Delegates opened 1,384 event-attendee sessions across 30 separate events, representing 942 distinct users, across all sessions run over the course of the event. 

What Omnio supported in Mongolia wasn't a single conversation in a single room. It was a conversation that had already been happening in pieces across a year of regional gatherings, and needed one final layer of translation to become a shared declaration. 

The General, Women's, and Youth Pastoralists' Declarations adopted in Ulaanbaatar carry forward what pastoralist communities from the Andes to the Himalayas to the Sahel built province by province and country by country. They go into UNCCD COP17 as one voice, not 102 separate ones.

This is exactly what Omnio was built for. In Mongolia, it did more than carry speeches from a stage to a headset, it let three declarations, each drafted independently across six provinces, converge into one shared document without anyone losing meaning along the way, for a room where 102 countries' worth of delegates would otherwise have needed dozens of human interpreters just to follow along. 

That same problem sits underneath any large, multilingual gathering: trade negotiations, humanitarian coordination meetings, multilateral forums, academic conferences with global attendance. Wherever the size of the room outpaces the number of shared languages in it, that's the gap Omnio was built to close.