DeepL is significantly expanding its real-time translation solution DeepL Voice. The company is adding additional languages, including Mandarin, and announcing an upcoming integration with Zoom Meetings. This should further break down the language barrier that employees within organizations regularly encounter.
DeepL launched DeepL Voice in November 2024. It can be used for virtual meetings and personal conversations. It provides real-time subtitles during virtual meetings. For one-on-one conversations, there is a mobile app that provides translations.
DeepL Voice is an important new component of the German translation company’s offering. Recent research by the company showed that 70 percent of the more than 1,000 organizations surveyed in the US experience operational problems due to language issues. For 61 percent, these challenges even slowed down international growth.
Of course, the above research is not entirely representative. The US is not exactly known as a country where many people speak a second or third language. The obvious exception is Spanish, and there are also population groups that speak their own language. In Europe, where English is at least at an acceptable level in some parts, these percentages will be much lower. However, we believe it is plausible that language barriers can have an impact on business success. The extent to which this is the case will vary (greatly) from region to region.
Key updates for DeepL Voice
Looking at today’s news for DeepL Voice, the first thing that stands out is that new languages have been added to the list of languages it can handle. The most important of these is Mandarin, but Ukrainian and Romanian are now also available in DeepL Voice. The languages already supported were English, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Italian. For subtitling during meetings, DeepL supports 35 languages via DeepL Translator. Two new languages have been added: Vietnamese and Hebrew.
The second important update today is that more features are becoming available for using DeepL Voice in virtual meetings. It is now possible to download complete transcripts and translations of a meeting. This should make it easier to follow up on matters after a meeting. Whether this will actually be the case will depend on how it is used. Transcripts are often huge documents, especially from long meetings, and it’s easy to get lost in them. Having a summary of the main points (if accurate) is much more useful.
Finally, DeepL Voice is expanding to a second meeting platform. It already integrated with Microsoft Teams, but it announces an upcoming integration with Zoom Meetings today too. This means that DeepL Voice will cover the two largest platforms. It will be particularly interesting to see whether DeepL Voice works better and continues to work better than the built-in tools in these platforms, especially now that more and more Copilots and other assistants are being added. With all the in-depth expertise that DeepL has in the field of translation and interpreting, we think they have a good chance.
Read also: DeepL makes its own API a more powerful interpreter than ever