Samuel Marseille Is Closing the Language Gap in Healthcare

“When a mother waited 5 hours for a translator in an ER, Samuel Marseille decided to build Oneshot AI — a platform serving millions of patients who can't wait.”

It was 3 a.m. in an emergency room. A mother came in with her four-year-old son. She did not speak English. On the other end of the line, the interpreter assigned to her call — Samuel Marseille — had fallen asleep. She waited. The child waited. Five hours passed before anyone could speak with her in a language she understood.

Samuel remembers it clearly. Not with self-pity, and not with distance. He remembers it as the moment a system failure became his assignment.

Samuel Marseille is the Founder and CEO of Oneshot Translation, Inc., based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a former interpreter who became a builder — not because the path was obvious, but because he had already seen what the absence of one costs.

He describes his arc plainly: he is becoming a better problem solver by building Oneshot AI, a language-barrier-breaking solution that changes how the world communicates across hundreds of languages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey, approximately 71 million Americans age five and older speak a language other than English at home. Among Spanish speakers alone, roughly 17.6 million reported speaking English less than "very well." Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 obligates healthcare providers to supply language services to patients with limited English proficiency, yet a national study of 4,876 U.S. hospitals found that only 64 percent offered language services of any kind. Professional interpreters were used in only 17 percent of physician encounters at admission, and in just 4 percent of nurse encounters.

Hospitals across the country operate on Epic — the dominant electronic health record platform — and Oneshot is not yet integrated with it, which closes doors regardless of the product's merit. Healthcare technology pilots also move slowly by design, with layers of procurement and compliance review standing between a founder and a signed contract.

The hinge was the waiting room at 3 a.m. — not guilt over falling asleep, but recognition that he had been a node in a system never designed to be reliable. He didn't pivot away from language access. He went toward it, deeper, with a technical solution.

Samuel built Oneshot Translation while completing his Master of International Development Administration at Western Michigan University (degree completed May 2026), studying the same institutional failures he was building a company to solve. Oneshot AI is designed as a bidirectional translation platform — a complement to qualified human interpreters, not a replacement.

On April 10th, Samuel won the Cultivate 269 pitch competition (self-reported). Oneshot Translation is currently seeking beta users, hospital partnerships, and funding to accelerate Epic integration.

If Oneshot succeeds, the next person who arrives at an ER at 3 a.m. speaking Haitian Creole, Somali, or Arabic is heard in the first minutes instead of waiting five hours.

Reach Samuel at oneshottranslation.com or on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/samuelmarseille . Language access is not a luxury feature. It is the floor.