"The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe... if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." — The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Babel Fish are gloriously useful, for obvious reasons — who doesn't want to understand any language? At Humanise.AI we've built a babel fish into our PlatformOne system. Let me explain why that might be important to you...
You know how the instruction leaflet in a packet of paracetamol is written in a variety of languages? Well, they do that for a good reason.
You won't be surprised to learn that 98% of the UK population over the age of three speaks English. But there are also 900,000 speakers of the Welsh language in the UK — people for whom their passion and preference for Welsh is so important that it's an official language (spot the bilingual road signs).
There's also over 0.5m people in the UK who speak Polish. And a further 1m who speak one of Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati or Arabic.
We get multi-lingual medicine instructions because those nearly 2m Welsh, Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Arabic speakers also need to understand how to take their medicines safely.
But if 2m people need to understand how to safely take their medicines in another language, perhaps those same 2m people might appreciate understanding your product or service in their chosen language?
Depending on your target customers, communicating in other languages might be even more important. At Humanise.AI, we have one UK client for whom 40% of their customers are Chinese. Different geographical and market niches can skew the proportion of non-English speakers quite dramatically.
But developing, and maintaining, your website in a variety of languages is a big challenge.
That's why we built automated language translation into Humanise.AI's PlatformOne — so even if your website can't translate between 100+ languages, your chat system can.
PlatformOne allows your customers to choose their preferred language from over 100 options — and we most definitely support Welsh, Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Arabic — as well as major European languages like French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc.
Of course, when we built our automated language translation we wanted it to translate everything, so it does. By everything, we mean:
- It translates the conversation between a customer and an AI bot — both messages from the customer to English, and messages from the bot to the customer's chosen language.
- It translates the conversation between a customer and human agents — both messages from the customer to English, and messages from agents to the customer's chosen language.
With PlatformOne your customers can type Polish and your human agents will see their messages translated into English. And when your agents reply in English, their messages will automatically be translated into Polish. In other words, your customers can communicate entirely in Polish (or any other language) and your human agents can communicate entirely in English. Our integrated Babel Fish ensures they can understand each other. How cool is that?!