XL8 Unveils Real-Time AI-Based Interpretation App for Zoom Meetings
February 21, 2023
XL8 Inc., a Silicon Valley tech company that provides AI-powered machine translation technology optimized for media content and dialogues, on Feb. 21 announced it is expanding its interpretation engine into the online video conferencing world, with a new app delivering accurate real-time translation during multi-language Zoom meetings.
“Zoom is now a permanent part of our lives for work and social interaction,” said Tim Jung, CEO of XL8. “It’s an all-too-common scenario where one participant may only speak French or Vietnamese while the host is a primarily English speaker, for example. The interaction would be limited at best, and when there are multiple participants each speaking a different language it can get unwieldy.
“Our easy-to-use app removes that language barrier and lets participants have more productive online meeting experiences without worrying about missing key words.”
The new Zoom Integration is based on the XL8 Interpret platform capabilities, the same core translation technologies used to power the company’s EventCat platform for live event interpretation and live subtitling and MediaCAT platform for media content localization.
The XL8 engine covers more than 20 languages and 355 language pairs. While this list already covers most of the languages frequently requested by users, XL8 is adding new languages to the stack.
“What sets this apart from competitive offerings is we are doing real-time translation and enabling multiple languages in the same software suite, and all based on the colloquial speech patterns people use every day,” said John Butterworth, VP of sales engineering at XL8. “It’s an ideal solution for any sized organization with distributed employees or even for individual users who often communicate with others who speak different languages.”
To use the new app, users need an XL8 account, which can be created on any of the XL8’s products. A few invited users from the waitlist will soon start getting an invitation email to enable the app for their Zoom account. Once enabled, the app will appear in the lower-right side of the user’s Zoom window under “Apps.”
After enabling the app, the process is slightly different for hosts and participants. The host first needs to select the language the host will be speaking as a participant and also all the languages that will be spoken during the meeting. Participants simply select their own language to join the session. Once the host initiates the app, a bot will automatically join and begin recording the meeting for interpretation.
The new app will be launched as Beta and be made available to the general public in March.