Our Analysts' Insights

In our last piece on this topic, we examined some of the technology challenges that stymy enterprises as they try to build conversation agents, such as chatbots, for multilingual audiences. Many developers express a pessimistic outlook about their ability to deliver them in multiple languages. One of the largest developers stated that it assigned the likelihood of success for these projects at less than 30%. In this installment, we discuss some of the business and conceptual difficulties that en...

Are you leaving customers in the lurch when it comes to discovering the most relevant entries when asking questions of your localized knowledge base? Our research confirms that organizations tend to spend a lot of money creating a great deal of support content in its original form, along with subsequent multilingual versions. However, they oftentimes invest very little, if any, effort to analyze how external audiences attempt to access these repositories. As entries begin to calcify into legacy ...

Chatbots, machine-authored text, and automated information retrieval and summarization are increasingly important to global businesses seeking to interact more efficiently with customers and meet their needs. Recent developments in this area have been spectacular and AI-driven intelligent agents (chatbots and virtual digital assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa) are among the most visible success cases for machine-generated content. Enterprises look to these applications as ways to reduc...

What do Barsoomian, Esperanto, Klingon, Ku, Na’vi, and Tenctonese have in common? They’re all languages created for sci-fi films, except for Esperanto, whose developer, Ludwig Zamenhof, sought to create a universal means of communication. They all represent a human desire to explore or undo the effects of Babel. Although they seem to be a thoroughly modern project, they are actually part of a scholarly project that has been underway since at least the Middle Ages. This research spawned a whole...

Organizations usually don’t invest much money or energy incorporating their knowledge bases (KBs) into the global customer experience (CX) – whether it’s for an original language or a localized version for other markets. This is despite the fact that each KB interaction can increase or decrease the value of your brand in customers’ eyes and thus plays a key role in cementing their loyalty. Based on extensive interviews with 36 global firms about how they create and manage multilingual KB con...

Intelligent or smart content has been a dream since the late 1990s. The concept refers to text, data, and audio-visual materials that contains machine-interpretable information describing its structure, giving some guidance as to its meaning, and defining its relationship to other content. Various technologies have tried to deliver on the promise of content that machines can act upon. Today some approaches are beginning to bear fruit, but significant hurdles remain in the base technologies and t...

User-generated content (UGC) has garnered a lot of attention due to the challenges it poses for localization, such as an abundance of spelling errors, the extent to which its meaning depends on context, a lack of consistency, and time sensitivity. But even as enterprises and language service providers (LSPs) struggle to deal with it, another type of generated content has been quietly swelling into a looming tsunami: machine-generated content (MGC). Today, increasing quantities of content appear ...

Chatbots are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in marketing and support. The potential for brands to interact with customers using natural language – and perhaps a bit of personality – without needing an army of paid human agents is driving major investment from enterprises. Tech giants – from Google to Facebook and IBM and Weibo to Microsoft – have started a virtual race to dominate this field. However, what is missing in this picture so far is serious attention to multilingual needs. Amazon, App...

Multilingual knowledge bases (MLKBs) are an essential component for many organizations in today’s global economy. Many companies still try to adapt their legacy word-based repository into searchable documents online. However, this is not enough to meet the agile-ized, mobile-ized, and personalized requirements of their customers and prospects. These forces, along with current strides in AI, are blowing up traditional monolingual models for digital product content delivery, which will in turn af...

It wasn't new handsets or mobile services that garnered the most attention at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Instead, it was automobiles: Intel's 5G-enabled autonomous car, Peugeot's Instinct concept vehicle, and flying car prototypes such as the AeroMobil. If any industry exemplifies disruptive change these days, it's the car industry.