Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski is considered a publicity-shy founder. Now he has built a stage for himself. DeepL is hosting a customer conference at the Hotel Telegraphenamt in Berlin-Mitte. Here, between Museum Island and Lieferando HQ, 100 years ago pneumatic tube letters were still sent; a historical place. Kutylowski is more interested in future music. We meet him and other journalists on the sidelines of the conference. There's a sticker on his MacBook that says “undaunted.” “Intrepid.”
DeepL competing with tech giants
Kutylowski chose the right industry for his courage: Despite all its successes, his AI unicorn is under pressure – and in direct competition with tech giants like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. In the summer, DeepL launched a new Large Language Model. This is said to have performed better in the blind test than – in descending order – Google Translate, ChatGPT-4 and Microsoft.
DeepL's advantage is its focus on translations, the niche has allowed Kutylowski to build a qualitative advantage. But the AI market is developing rapidly. In order to maintain its leadership position, the company must continuously innovate. This is also what the conference in Berlin-Mitte is about.
A video conference in which French, German and Japanese are spoken
Because DeepL is using the conference for the official launch of DeepL Voice: a tool that translates live during telephone conferences. Pure music of the future, so to speak. However, the language translations are not set to music, but are displayed as text messages.
Can’t Microsoft Teams do that too? “Yes, but not that good,” says Kutylowski, unimpressed. DeepL conducted tests with customers to understand how they perceive DeepL Voice compared to Microsoft Teams – “they clearly prefer DeepL.”
A pre-recorded screen recording of a four-language video conference is intended to demonstrate the tool. There is a slight latency: half a second, says Kutylowski later, this time with a bit of grit in his teeth. That depends on the language – in Japanese and German, for example, the context of a sentence is often only recognizable and therefore translatable at the end (because in these languages the verb is at the end).
The largest growth market for DeepL Voice is outside Europe
Source: https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/technologie/ki-blase-milliarden-schwere-us-konkurrenz-warum-deepls-jarek-kutylowski-trotzdem-keine-angst-hat/
