Over the Christmas break I started to reflect on the nature of service provision in the Language Services industry in the light of new technologies coming out of machine learning and artificial intelligence advances and my own predictions of the influences upon the industry and the industry’s response to them.
There are the recent announcements of adaptive and neural network machine translation; pervasive cloud platforms with ubiquitous connectivity and cognitive capabilities; an upsurge in low-cost, high-benefit open source tooling and frameworks; and many mature api’s and standards.
All of these sophisticated opportunities really do mean that as a company providing services you have to be informed, adaptable, and agile; employ clever, enthusiastic people; and derive joy and satisfaction from harnessing disruptive influences to the benefit of yourselves and your customers.
I do have concerns: How do we sustain the level of investment necessary to stay abreast of all these influences and produce novel services and solutions from them in an environment of very small margins and low tolerance to increased or additional costs?
Don’t get me wrong though. Having spent the last 10 years engaging with world-class research centers such as ADAPT, working alongside thought leading academics and institutions such as DFKI and InfAI, participating in European level Innovation Actions and Projects, and generally ensuring that our company has the required awareness, understanding and expertise, I continue to be positive and enthusiastic in my approach to these challenges.
I am satisfied that we are active in all of the spaces that industry analysts see as being currently significant. To whit: ongoing evaluations of adaptive translation environments and NMT, agile platforms powered by distributed services and serverless architectures, Deep Content (semantic enrichment and NLP), and Review Sentinel (machine learning and text classification).
Less I sound complacent, we have much more in the pipeline and my talented and knowledgeable colleagues are excited for the future.