Language I/O aims to strengthen its AI-powered customer service localization service Posted on : Jan 12 - 2022

As enterprises embrace digital transformation, many are expanding customer bases beyond the confines of their pre-pandemic demographics. For example, the cross-border ecommerce market is growing at double the rate of domestic ecommerce — driven by consumers seeking brands unavailable in their home countries. According to Worldpay, 55% of online shoppers worldwide purchased from another country in 2020.

But while digitization provides an opportunity for businesses to expand their target markets, many run up against the challenge of localizing their content for particular customer segments. It’s true that the majority of customers prefer to buy products with information in their native language. But companies, lured by the promise of new business — particularly in the chaos of the pandemic — sometimes cut corners on localizing experiences. Nearly 68% of users in a recent survey said that they encounter web translations that aren’t correct or are confusing because they lack sufficient cultural understanding.

A vast number of companies provide enterprise localization services for enterprises, but an emerging subset is leveraging AI in an attempt to speed up the translation process. San Francisco, California-based Lilt develops AI-powered translation software for marketing, customer support, and ecommerce use cases. Unbabel-owned Lingo24 and Smartling tap a combination of AI-powered translation tools and human translators to localize product descriptions, user guides, websites, software, and apps. There’s also Lokalise, a “continuous localization” platform that helps companies ensure that their software is tailored for target markets.

Language I/O is a small, relative newcomer to the localization space, having raised just $12.1 million in venture capital since its founding in 2011. (That includes a $6.5 million series A led by Omega Venture Partners, which the company announced today.) While Language I/O isn’t in short of rivals in a market that could be worth $5.51 billion by 2028, CEO Heather Shoemaker asserts that the company’s technology significantly differentiates it from other solutions currently available.

The challenge of localization

Localization isn’t as straightforward as basic translation. Phrases are longer in some languages than in others (e.g., “buy now” in English is “acheter maintenant” in French), meaning that web designers have to redesign page elements to fit the longer translated phrases. Moreover, some languages run top-to-bottom or right-to-left, which not every website template supports. And cultural considerations in each language can dictate word choice. For example, to a speaker in Japan, where word choice depends on the status of the speaker as well as the listener, friendly and informal ads that play well in the U.S. might rub them the wrong way.

Cheyenne, Wyoming-based Language I/O aims to deliver solutions specifically for customer service localization, enabling companies to use monolingual agents or chatbots to provide support articles, answer emails, and chat across multiple languages. The startup claims that it can get a customer up and running with translations within 24 hours, thanks to the Language I/O platform’s use of AI.

Shoemaker founded Language I/O several years ago, after spending the first decade of her career as a traveling internationalization engineer. After exiting lucratively from a Denver-area startup, View more