How AI Can Level Up Translation Services For Businesses

In the past, we have written about how crucial translation services are for business, especially as our world gets more interconnected. Since then, this field has been advanced thanks to generative AI. Now companies are investing in AI-powered translation that’s fast, seamless and (mostly) accurate.

Sanket Mishra  Pexels

Supporting a Digitally Connected World

Translation is just one of many services required to maintain our digitally connected world. Through both text and now audio, translation allows online services to serve international audiences without learning a whole new language. Likewise, customers don’t have to jump through extra hoops to find products online.

Today, most businesses need to maintain an online presence to find success. Some, like video streaming, operate globally and spend a lot making sure everything is subtitled and supported for foreign audiences. Others, like iGaming, operate in specific regions to focus on a more local audience. The result is something like Paddy Power online casino gambling, which serves the UK and Ireland, and so it’s inaccessible outside those regions. Geo-restricted business models make sense for some industries, but for others they avoid international audiences because they don’t have the resources to cater to them. Translation is one of those considerations, but now understanding the languages of the world is getting much easier.

Groundbreaking AI Audio Translation

Rudimentary text-based translation has been around for a long time, in varying degrees of quality. Some languages, especially those that use kanji like Japanese or Chinese, are very context-specific and difficult for machines to parse. While this has improved since generative AI hit the scene, it has also enabled translation through other means like audio.

Spotify was one of the earliest companies to explore audio translation in late 2023. The company unveiled its voice translation pilot to support an aggressive expansion into podcasting. This tool doesn’t just understand and translate what podcasters say on the transcript, it also creates an AI clone of the podcaster’s voice. That cloned voice sounds just like the presenter and plays in real-time with video podcasts, speaking in a language that the podcaster can’t speak.

Needless to say, this is a tremendous advancement in translation services. Spotify’s service is curated and strictly managed for their biggest and best podcasts, so translation isn’t happening in real-time. If it was, there’d be a lot more mistakes and AI hallucinations. Given Spotify’s expansion into audiobooks over the past year, the potential of this technology could be used to translate those too.

The AI Translation Industry is Growing

Spotify is far from the only company exploring AI-powered translation. Others include Smartcat, a translation service that has been in the market since 2016. It specifically targets other enterprises, providing B2B automated translation services. Then, in late 2024, Smartcat secured $43 million (£32 million) in funding to expand its operations.

More broadly, investment seems to be pouring into automated translation services. A report from Grand View Research claims that the industry was worth $978.2 million (£744.3 million) in 2022 but could flourish in 2030, thanks to a 13.5% compound annual growth rate. At that CAGR, the industry could be worth somewhere around $2.3 billion (£1.7 billion).

We can’t know if those predictions are accurate yet, but fast, automated translation services will certainly be in high demand as more businesses expand to international markets. The internet isn’t going anywhere soon, so we can expect more services that help both communication and commerce flow freely across the online world.