Overview

Lilt is the leading global experience platform, enabling organizations to build and deliver multilingual experiences at scale across every step of the global customer journey through our translation technology and services.

Our technology uses AI and automation to make the process of localizing digital content and experiences faster, better, and simpler, bringing human-powered, technology-assisted translations to global enterprises. The Lilt Platform integrates across popular content, commerce, and collaboration systems, making it simple to quickly translate content, then review and publish that translated content with the click of a button.

Supernova Award Category

Next Generation Customer Experience

The Problem

For many companies, building a great customer experience really means building a great customer experience for the customers who speak the company's primary language (typically English).

The Brookings Institute estimates that by 2030, there will be over 4.7 billion middle-class and affluent consumers across the non-English-speaking regions of the world. These billions of existing and potential future customers either don't speak English at all, or speak it below a level of fluency where they would much prefer to do business in their native language. As a result, companies that decline to adequately invest in a high-quality global experience either can’t serve these consumers at all, which is bad for everyone involved, or force them to buy from a competitor who makes the effort to speak their language.

The Solution

Lilt makes it easy to quickly, accurately, and affordably translate all of a company’s content across all of its digital experience into any languages its customers speak. Our platform integrates with a wide variety of content, commerce, code, and collaboration systems, making it easy to quickly localize a company’s entire global experience.

Lilt provides its software as a standalone translation solution to organizations with in-house translators, as well as full end-to-end enterprise translation services via Lilt translators using the Lilt Platform. Working with Lilt, organizations like Intel, ASICS, Emerson, and the US Air Force save millions of dollars in translation costs, are able to translate content within hours (as opposed to days and weeks), reduce human translation errors and delays, translate millions more words with the same or even reduced budgets, and scale their global footprint.

The results

After working for nearly a year, we launched our latest version of our CAT tool called Lilt Translate, featuring faster performance, better response-time worldwide, improved tag placement, and more. With the newest version of Lilt Translate, linguists now have the fastest, most responsive, and most accurate cloud-based translation technology on the market, enabling them to work twice as fast while producing higher quality translations.

The latest version of Lilt Translate was intended to provide improvements for both translators and customers. For translators, the tool has seen increases in metrics across the board. Most notably, we’ve seen 250% faster in-browser performance (allowing linguists to translate content quicker than before), 2X faster worldwide response time (enabling more linguists globally to use Lilt Translate), and 30% more accurate HTML tag auto-placement (providing more accurate translations and improved productivity).

For customers, improved translator quickness and efficiency leads to quicker go-to-market times. The rebuilt tool also allows translators to leverage existing translation suggestions more frequently (typically 10% more than competitors), enabling higher ROI on localization spending. As well, the ease of use and reliability of the tool allows customers to support 300+ languages quickly and easily, allowing them to make more content available to customers across the globe.

Metrics

For many of its customers, like Intel and ASICS, Lilt has been able to significantly reduce costs.. Intel employs over 110,000 people spread across offices and facilities in over 60 countries. With such a global footprint, Intel needs to provide a consistent experience to customers, employees, and partners from different cultures who speak different languages. Lilt’s adaptive neural machine translation (NMT) technology has enabled Intel to reduce overall costs by 40% year-over-year while one of Intel’s business units doubled its volume of translated content.

For over 70 years, ASICS has manufactured and sold some of the highest performing athletic footwear and apparel on the market. Before Lilt, ASICS relied on 100% human translation. While quality was high, turnaround times were slow and costs were rising to unsustainable levels. Lilt's approach to combining skilled human translators with an adaptive neural MT system gives ASICS the increased time savings it needed to better serve its partners across the business, all while preserving the high quality on which a brand like ASICS prides itself. Lilt has delivered 60% faster translation turnaround times for ASICS, making the localization team even better business partners to their global stakeholders. By incorporating Lilt's human-in-the-loop solution, ASICS was able to not only increase turnaround times - but also achieve a 70% year-over-year decrease in localization cost.

The Technology

The company has built a suite of 60+ integrations with popular content, commerce, code, and collaboration systems including CMSs, code repositories, knowledge bases, e-commerce platforms, file-sharing systems, and more.  These integrations make it simple for customers to publish content in English, quickly send it to Lilt for translation, and have it automatically sent back to those same content systems for review and publishing across every step of their global customer experience.

Disruptive Factor

Lilt presents a transformational application of artificial intelligence in localization, an industry that touches every global (and globally aspiring) enterprise around the world, and is ripe for disruption. The Lilt Platform uses a human-in-the-loop AI process surfaced through a cloud translation tool that enables human translators to translate twice as fast for half the cost. The key to Lilt’s technology is using AI to augment, rather than replace, the skill of a human translator. In addition, many systems used for translation require periodic training and retraining, which means that a translator may have to fix the same linguistic error time and time again, wasting time and money. With Lilt, our AI system trains in real-time, making translators significantly faster, reducing costs, and increasing translation quality.

The application of Lilt translation technology produces transformational results for enterprise and government organizations around the world. Lilt provides its software as a standalone translation solution to organizations with in-house translators, as well as full end-to-end enterprise translation services via Lilt translators using our Platform. Working with Lilt, organizations like Intel, ASICS, and the US Air Force save millions of dollars in translation costs, reduce human translation errors and delays, translate millions more words with the same or even reduced budgets, and scale their global footprint.

Shining Moment

In April 2022, Lilt raised $55 million in Series C funding, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $92.5 million. This capital will help Lilt on its mission to make information accessible to everyone regardless of where they were born or which language they speak. Lilt has also been recognized on the Forbes AI 50 list (3 years running), Business Intelligence Group's Artificial Intelligence Excellence list (twice), and CB Insights AI 100 list, among other honors.