In the ever-changing artificial intelligence (AI) world, there is a place that is gaining an unrivaled status as an AI-based language-specific service. DeepL started in Germany in 2017 and now has 200,000 companies around the world as customers.
DeepL Chief Revenue Officer David Parry Jones, whom Mail Business recently met via video, is in charge of all customer management and support.
DeepL is focusing on securing customers by introducing a large number of services tailored to their needs, such as launching “Deep L for Enterprise,” a corporate product, and “Deep L Voice,” a voice translation solution, last year.
“We are focusing on translators, which are key products, and DeepL Voice is gaining popularity as it is installed in the Teams environment,” Pari-Jones CRO said. “We are also considering installing it on Zoom, a video conference platform.”
DeepL’s voice translation solution is currently integrated into Microsoft’s Teams. If participants in the meeting using Teams speak their own language, other participants can check subtitles that are translated in real-time. As the global video conference market accounts for nearly 90% of Zoom and MS Teams, if DeepL solutions are introduced through Zoom, the language barrier in video conferences will now disappear.
DeepL solutions are all focused on saving time and resources going into translation and delivering accurate results. “According to a study commissioned by Forrester Research last year, companies’ internal document translation time was reduced by 90% when using DeepL solutions,” Parry Jones CRO said, explaining that it is playing a role in breaking down language barriers and strengthening efficiency.
The Asian market, including Korea, a non-English speaking country, is considered a key market for DeepL. CEO Yarek Kutilovsky also visits Korea almost every year and meets with domestic customers.
“The Asia-Pacific region and Japan are behind DeepL’s rapid growth,” said CRO Pari-Jones. In translation services, the region accounts for 45% of sales, he said. “In particular, Japan is the second largest market, and Korea is closely following it.” He explains that Korea and Japan have similar levels of English proficiency, and there are many large corporations that are active in multiple countries, so there is a high demand for high-quality translations.
In Japan, Daiwa Securities is using DeepL solutions in the process of disclosing performance-related data to the world, and Fujifilm and NEC are also representative customers of DeepL. In Korea, Yanolja, Lotte Innovate, and Lightning Market are using DeepL.
DeepL currently only has branches in Japan among Asian countries, and the Korean branch is also considering establishing it, although the exact timing has not been set.
“DeepL continues to improve translation quality and invest at the same time for growth in Korea,” said CRO Pari-Jones. “We need a local team for growth.” We can’t promise you the exact schedule, but (the Korean branch) will be a natural development,” he said.
Meanwhile, as Generative AI services such as ChatGPT become more common, these services are also not the main function, but they also perform compliance levels of translation, threatening translators.
DeepL also sees them as competitors and competes. “DeepL is a translation company, so the difference is that it strives to provide accuracy or innovative language services,” Pari-Jones CRO said. “When comparing translation quality, the gap has narrowed slightly with ChatGPT.” We will continue to improve quality while testing regularly,” he said.
[Reporter Jeong Hojun]
