The new patent number, US 9,141,606, titled "Methods and systems for multi-engine machine translation", covers two GeoFluent innovations:
- A proprietary linguistic layer that allows Lionbridge to tailor each GeoFluent machine translation instance to reflect customers' specific use of language and messaging, thereby ensuring consistency across industry terminology, products, and brands.
- The ability to apply this proprietary customization layer across multiple machine translation (MT) engines. This allows Lionbridge's linguistics experts to apply a best-of-breed approach to selecting underlying MT technology and, when combined with GeoFluent's customization layer, provides clients with broad-based language coverage.
These unique features of GeoFluent provide an omni-lingual solution for contact centers and support departments to support their customers and prospects across multiple languages without having to establish in-country operations or hire multilingual agents.
"Contact centers realize the multiplier effect of multilingual support for customer loyalty and growth," said Tom Tseki, vice president and general manager of customer care solutions at Lionbridge, in a statement. "At the same time, they are under pressure from consumers to expand from voice-only support to self-service, social, and digital channels. The sum of these now patented GeoFluent innovations provides contact centers with the translation quality they need to effectively eliminate language as a communications barrier across all channels."
"First-generation real-time translation solutions that rely on pure[machine translation]-based technology are limited because of the potentially negative impact their translation quality can have on customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer effort," said Jay Marciano, director of real-time translation development at Lionbridge, in a statement. "With slang, acronyms, misspellings, and channel or language-specific lingo commonplace in spoken and written communications, the intent of what a customer and agent are trying to communicate can be lost or garbled when translated using a traditional MT engine. The new patent for the second-generation GeoFluent solution overcomes these traditional MT issues by combining its linguistic layer with the world's top automated translation technologies."
GeoFluent announced enhancements earlier this year that broadened the solution, including omnichannel customer care features like voice, chat, email, helpdesk/ticketing and forms/communities.