Babeltext, a multilingual chat platform, is enabling businesses to engage with audiences by translating communications across 135 languages into English.
Babeltext consolidates messaging from services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, SMS, Discord, Telegram, and Web Chat. This integration allows companies to manage their messaging needs through a single platform, negating the need for multiple applications to communicate across different social channels.
The automatic translation of messages from 135 languages into English is a key feature of Babeltext. "We're hugely proud of the fact that we, uniquely, translate 135 languages to and from English, allowing anyone, anywhere, the access to services they need," said Founder David Hayes. He added, "Using live operators far exceeds the capabilities of bots, which we all find extremely frustrating to chat with online. Additionally, messaging allows teams to work more quickly than voice calls, as it allows them to have multiple conversations at once."
Babeltext is currently offering a simplified Multilingual Web Chat service, aimed at assisting businesses in realising the impact of customer messaging. This service allows businesses, such as online retailers, to target global customers without worrying about language barriers. David Hayes stated, "Retail, Tourism and Education are all industries that frequently juggle with languages, so they need to be adopting technologies that help them overcome this and even get them ahead of their competitors."
Though Babeltext has already been rolled out in culturally diverse regions such as Singapore and the USA, David Hayes noted that "Australia was always the target market." This focus stems from statistics showing that 43% of students at the University of Sydney are from overseas, prompting questions about how non-native English speakers access accurate information about educational opportunities.
Australian businesses predominantly stick to Web Chat or Facebook Messenger, despite the global dominance of WhatsApp, which boasts 2 billion active users. The integration of WeChat into Babeltext's offerings expands the platform's reach into the Asian market, and ongoing discussions are taking place with various partners in the APAC region. David Hayes commented, "If businesses want to go global, they need to be using the channels their customers are using and doing so in their language."
The recent 2021 Census revealed that 27.6% of Australia's population was born overseas, highlighting the use of Mandarin and Arabic as prominent languages spoken at home alongside English. Despite this, technology to assist non-English speakers in engaging with Australian services remains minimal. Beyond live telephone translation services, technological assistance is noticeably sparse, as pointed out by David Hayes: "Apart from organising live telephone translation services, there is little to no technology used to help non-English speakers engage with Australian services."
Research by Babeltext through mystery shopping on 50 Australian consumer-facing companies revealed that less than 5% had any multilingual capacity. Furthermore, none of Australia's top 10 support services were found to cater to community members for whom English is a second language. This discovery led to the development of Youth Chat, a service designed to provide support, particularly for youth who are not strong in English. "We were shocked at this and hence developed Youth Chat to address the lack of support, especially for youth where English is a second language," said David Hayes.
According to recent studies, messaging channels are gaining traction over traditional communication methods for customer service. A Twilio study indicated that messaging has a 98% customer satisfaction rate, and Nielsen reported that 56% of customers prefer messaging businesses over making phone calls. Forrester Research suggested possible savings of up to 40% in customer service costs when businesses adopt messaging over voice interactions.
