Lilt, an AI-powered enterprise translation company, held its first Lilt Ascend virtual conference yesterday, October 22. The theme was localizing at scale in a digital world, a topic that underscores the challenge companies face as the volume of digital content continues to grow exponentially while the pool of linguistic talent remains constant.
The conference came right on the heels of Lilt becoming the first ever Diamond sponsor of the Women in Localization organization, which was announced earlier this week. And indeed, advancing the role of women in the industry was a recurring theme throughout the day’s sessions. The conference kicked off with a keynote speech by Lilt’s chief evangelist, Paula Shannon, who emphasized the benefits of finding a mentor and filling in gaps in financial literacy to those seeking more senior roles in the industry.
Following the introductions, Lilt’s CEO Spence Green gave a presentation on how Lilt is helping enterprises address the challenge of localizing digital content at scale. For those whose first introduction to Lilt was through their adaptive MT-enabled Translator Workbench, it was informative to hear about improvements in translation and review workflows. These include a Neural AutoReview feature that provides reviewers with context-based stylistic suggestions for text improvements. Green also announced several other new and improved services, including connectors to leading TMS solutions, an on-prem private cloud deployment option, and improved data modeling via Lilt Insights.
The conference was a well-balanced mix of product updates and demos, conversations with industry thought leaders on how they’ve driven digital transformation, and presentations on AI that ranged from the technical to the practical. Speakers from Intel, Aisics Digital, and Canva took the audience through challenges they faced scaling their localization programs, and how Lilt has helped them achieve the efficiency gains needed to keep up with their global customers.
Lilt Ascend was hosted on Hopin, an interactive online event platform. As anyone who has attended virtual conferences in this brave new world knows, the platform can make or break an event. Hopin did not disappoint. Though there were a few minor delays lining up speakers for Q&A portions, the audiovisual quality was excellent and the UX was quite intuitive. The networking function also worked well, setting up participants with one-on-one sessions lasting 15 minutes each. Overall, it was a solid solution that any event organizer would be remiss not to consider.
