WORKTOOLS businessinfomag.uk magazine 22 Multi-lingual business teams, tour guides and even professional football managers are among those likely to benefit from a new AI-powered translation app launched by Interprefy. Interprefy’s core business is the provision of remote simultaneous interpretation (RSI) services for in-person and online meetings, conferences and events using professional interpreters and, more recently, AI-based technology (see box). Its new smartphone app, Interprefy Now, extends the company’s capabilities to more spontaneous, face-to-face interactions, using an AI engine to enable two-way communication between up to 30 people with no common language. The app translates speech into each person’s preferred language (more than 80 are supported), giving everyone present the ability to listen to and respond to what’s being said in their native tongue. In addition to real-time audio translations, the app provides text translations. Interprefy calls these captions, but they are in fact verbatim, full text records. Interprefy CEO Oddmund Braaten says that although Interprefy Now provides automated translation on-the-go, with no need for booking or specialist equipment, it is in a different league to solutions like Google Translate. “Ad hoc translations when you are on holiday, for example, are already covered by things like Google Translate, but they are slow and only support one pair of languages at a time. This is fine if you are an individual interacting with a shopkeeper, say. But when you are in business, you need things to be slick. Interprefy Now is faster and also supports a multitude of different languages simultaneously, so it is a step up in terms of performance that allows groups of people to work with reasonable speed.” On-the-go translation He adds that while business people tend to use English as a lingua franca, many of those they interact with don’t, suggesting there is significant untapped demand for seamless, real-time translation. “People who conduct international business all speak English but academic or industry experts often don’t, so there is a hidden need to provide a multilingual capability. It is going to take a while for our customers to realise how useful this is going to be for them, but I do believe Interprefy Now is going to unblock a river of need.” All that’s required to use the app is a smartphone with internet connectivity. The meeting organiser will need an app subscription, but invited guests can download and use the app without charge. Translations happen in a virtual room, which the organiser invites guests into by showing them a guest QR code on his/ her smartphone. Guests scan this with their smartphone camera to download the app and gain entry into a session. The user then selects the language they want to hear and their preferred language for captions. As with the app download, they only need to do this the first time they are invited to use the app. One button Once set up is complete, there is just one button to use, the Speak button (and arrows for scrolling up and down text captions). Only one person can speak at a time, and to hear the translation you must hold the smartphone to your ear or, preferably, use earbuds/ headphones so that you can read captions while listening. For obvious reasons, being designed for small groups of people, Interprefy Now doesn’t support smartphone loudspeaker mode. When someone has finished speaking, they touch the Speak button again. This reactivates the Speak button on other participants’ smartphones, giving someone else the chance to say something. At any point the organiser can take back control by disconnecting a participant’s mic. “People have to take it in turns to speak,” explains Braaten. “This enforces good meeting practices that any meeting should have but which are essential in multi-lingual ones. You should speak one at a time and speak in coherent sentences.” Interprefy developed the app in just three months, and from the outset its focus was to keep things simple, with just one button. As a result, it lacks certain features that a business user might expect, notably the ability to save captions. However, because this is provided on Interprefy’s other solutions, it should be easy to add if customers demand it. www.interprefy.com AI-powered The launch of Interprefy Now is made possible by the technology used in Interprefy’s AI-powered automated live speech translation solution for meetings and events, which was launched one year ago and renamed Interprefy AI just last month. Developed for structured, organised meetings, conferences, events and training sessions and offering seamless integration with online platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and ON24, Interprefy AI provides a cost-effective automated translation solution where support from professional interpreters (also provided by Interprefy) is considered impractical or unaffordable. By using the Interprefy AI engine (with 6,000 language combinations) in Interprefy Now, Interprefy is extending the benefits of simultaneous AI translation to spontaneous, small-scale, two-way interactions for the first time. Interprefy launches live translation app for small meetings of up to 30 people Oddmund Braaten
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