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Zoom just launched Zoom Workplace--an AI-powered open collaboration platform--last week. The new platform aims to streamline workflows and provide AI-powered insights, courtesy of its generative AI tool, Zoom AI Companion.

Some of those insights include real-time translations. First launched in September 2023, the AI Companion automatically detects when one of 36 supported languages is being spoken in a meeting, and then generates a meeting summary in that language. It was updated in February to support nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese) for real-time translations in chat. Zoom said it will be able to support more languages soon.

But with its newest language options, does this mean Zoom is about to displace entrepreneurs who already provide multilingual translations for other companies and customers? Heather Shoemaker, founder and chief executive officer of Language I/O, says she's not worried. Her company, founded in 2011, provides accurate and real-time translations for its clients' customer support in over 150 languages.

"Anybody can plug in Google Translate or a large language model, and that's basically what Zoom is doing. It's a generic real-time translation solution," Shoemaker says. "Our specialty is that we'll make sure that the real-time translations we provide are custom for that company." Whereas a generic translation can be done for hello and goodbye, for example, the company's AI technology translates product names and industry-specific terminology that can otherwise be easily mistranslated.

"People who want our service recognize that a generic translation model is going to mangle their terms, their company product [names,] industry-specific terminologies, and will reject it. That's why we have really big customers that have used us for a decade," Shoemaker says.

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