Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and Founder of DeepL, highlights how the company has revolutionized global communication with cutting-edge AI translation. By blending research-driven innovation with human expertise, DeepL delivers nuanced text and real-time speech translations, enabling businesses to excel in multilingual markets with precision and security.
What inspired the creation of DeepL, and how has the vision evolved since its inception?
DeepL was developed in 2017 with a mission to break down language barriers faced by businesses through specialised AI technology.
Seamless communication across languages is crucial for companies operating internationally or looking to scale – both in order to boost efficiency and to find new markets. Our models are purpose-built for language and translation tasks, offering unparalleled precision.This accuracy is further enhanced by the input of many human translators to find the careful balance between accuracy and fluency and provide more natural sounding translations.
We are constantly evolving to ensure we are meeting our customers’ needs and have achieved this by introducing innovative products such as the Glossary feature, Tone setting for translations, and Style for writing. Our latest innovation, DeepL Voice, provides voice translation for real time-spoken interactions. Today, we offer AI translation and writing solutions used by over 100K+ businesses worldwide.
Can you share a pivotal moment in DeepL’s journey that significantly impacted its trajectory?
The recent launch of DeepL Voice marks our first foray into speech based translations. With the first two products,Voice for Meetings and Voice for Conversations, DeepL Voice makes it possible to conduct virtual meetings across several languages as well as real-time translation for in-person conversations. We believe that real-time speech translation is the next frontier for us as a business, enabling us to extend our expertise beyond writing solutions, and enabling businesses to communicate in multiple languages as required.
What differentiates DeepL’s AI and neural networks from other translation technologies?
Our success comes down to the strong academic-level research we’ve always been active in, coupled with the specialization on solving translation and language problems for businesses in those high-value use cases. There are not a lot of software companies that have such a deep tech expertise and carry out such detailed AI research.
DeepL is taking its unique offerings a step further by being one of the first in the world to commercially debut the new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX GB200 systems, helping researchers to test new ideas faster, train models more quickly, and deliver near real-time inference whenever our users need us.
How do you ensure translations maintain cultural nuance and context across diverse languages?
We work hand in hand with thousands of human translators to ensure our models outperform the competition. Our expert team of translators is involved across many states of our R&D process, from building the models for a new language to improving existing ones.
By incorporating a human element in the initial phases of our research, we avoid the risk of our translations sounding robotic, and help ensure that our translations pick up cultural nuances. This also applies during the evaluation stage; while synthetic evaluations deliver quick results, the ground truth is to ask those that have invented and mastered the use of language to provide feedback on translations – how accurate they are, how nuanced, how native the language feels. Only we humans can judge on that. To this day, some of our earliest adopters and users are translators.
What AI and machine learning advancements do you foresee driving DeepL’s future innovation?
Language AI is one of the most strategic investments a business can make. Since our inception, we have been a research-driven company. We will continue to invest heavily in our development as a company, creating specialized translation and writing solutions for businesses worldwide. Combining our depth of research with proprietary data accumulated over seven years, we can understand unique business needs and address them with our solutions.
B2B is our fastest-growing segment and is at the core of our GTM initiatives, driving our platform expansion. Our reach across markets has been further solidified by key milestones this year, such as the opening of our first office in the US and the launch of our services in Arabic.
What growth opportunities do you see for DeepL in the Middle East, and how are you tailoring the product for that market?
At DeepL, we understand the unique business needs of the region and the importance of Arabic communication for businesses here, which is why, earlier this year, we launched our translation services in Arabic to provide millions of companies and employees in all industries whose primary language is Arabic, the opportunity to go global and standardize communication across borders. Additionally, Arabic is the first language we have launched that is written and read from right-to-left, which represents a significant milestone in our journey.
How do you approach partnerships with regional businesses and governments to expand DeepL’s global presence?
We work closely with our customers globally, regardless of sector, to truly understand their needs. Our customers span multiple sectors, from the private to the public, including governments. Learning more about their different needs has enabled us to build solutions tailored to their needs; for example, we launched a specific commercial package earlier in the year called DeepL for Enterprise, which covered multiple areas our customers had been asking us for.
What industries or use cases have the most potential for adopting DeepL’s services, particularly in multilingual regions like the Middle East?
Some of the sectors that benefit the most from Language AI are retail, manufacturing, and legal.
Using retail as an example, Language AI allows for operational efficiency by scaling communication across global offices, and reducing translation timings. Language AI can help develop multilingual marketing assets and customer service tools, translate internal systems, and enable seamless international expansion.
We’ve also seen significant benefits within the legal and manufacturing sectors. Given the UAE is home to diverse cultures and languages, legal professionals can benefit from DeepL’s AI translation services to bridge the language barrier often encountered by international law firms and practitioners. Our translator allows global manufacturing facilities to ease their supply chain and distribution with accurate translation of customs documents, product descriptions and local regulations.
How does DeepL’s technology empower startups and SMEs, especially those looking to scale globally?
Many startups and SMEs operating globally or looking to scale internationally need quick and accurate translation solutions. From employees communicating in their native languages and still understanding each other to external communications or legal documents, translation is a daily requirement for most organizations.
This is where we come in. At DeepL, we are focused on addressing the business use-case for language. Due to a lack of precision, several everyday AI tools pose security risks for businesses. Known for accuracy and security, our tools allow businesses to uphold professional credibility via trusted, high-quality, full-stack technology within a rigorous security framework.
