Takeasy - First Live Human Translation Service

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Takeasy provides the human translation services to help people who are travelling abroad to break the language barriers. Takeasy is trying to fulfill the needs of most travellers that “traditional” translation services cannot meet. They redesigned a creative new version of their translation app to include the major feature of live-human translation. Below is our interview with Takeasy App Team:

Q: What’s Takeasy’s story? How did Takeasy start?

A: Takeasy is a startup project since 2015. Takeasy app team found that the travel and tourism industry becomes a huge market in China and many countries. What’s more, the mobile internet is also growing extremely fast at the same time.

Although some translation apps can help to deal with the language issues in some extend, the core problem is still not solved. Generally, those apps can just meet the needs before or after the travel, but they cannot fix the specific problem during the travel. What’s more, language barriers are the basic problems that we should solve before specific travel issues. Without language communication, there will be no ways to solve any issues during the travel.

So our team decided to develop an app for helping all the travellers to completely get rid of language barriers and solve all those specific problems/issues.

In the very beginning, Takeasy was providing both on-line translation and “machine translation” service, and it supported both text, audio & image translation at the same time. Although Takeasy could support voice recognition at that time, the basic form of translation was still texts by texts. This means users could use their voice to speak out words or sentence without typing letters, and it was really very efficient to use because of the high recognition rate. As for the audio & image translation, we provided this service based on our on-line real translators. And this feature made Takeasy much more humanized when users travel abroad.

In the end of 2015, although Takeasy has served over 152 counties’ users across 5095 cities, we still found the needs for instant on-line translation with real translators are growing fast, and there are more and more users, not only Chinese users but also every traveller all around world, want to use this kind of translation service. So we changed our strategy into much easier and highly efficient way, focusing on global users and starting our “Live-Human Translation Service” project. After the preparation on product, marketing and branding, the latest brand-new Takeasy was launched on April 22, 2016.

Q: What was technically the most challenging part of developing it?

A: During developing this new version of Takeasy, we’ve found many challenges from technology, operation, marketing and branding, but the most challenging part is from the technology of localization. This challenge is bringing us a lot of troubles now.

Firstly, because of this new version of Takeasy supports 9 languages inter-translation, it was reborn to be a globalized application for everyone on this planet. So we have to prepare to localize all the strings of the app to make all the interfaces perfectly suit for its local users in different countries. We’ve done on 2 languages: English and Chinese in the first launched version, while others are still under developed. Secondly, the basic calling service also needs to be localized. Because we are providing a global on-line voice translation service, the quality of call becomes very important; we have to make sure every call from all over the world will be connected with high speed and quality. Takeasy want to provide extraordinary user experience for all the users globally, and this is why we pay much attention on this challenging part.

Q: What makes Takeasy translator app a good choice?

A: A recent Takeasy survey of people from over 80 countries/districts shows that the language barrier (31%) is the second biggest problem that people face. This was second only to budget (33%), and topped difficulty of the travel route (29%), lack of tourist attractions (24%), cuisine (23%), culture (19%) and traffic (14%). What’s more, over half of those surveyed (57%) have always experienced language communication obstacles, with another third (30%) saying that they sometimes run into this problem.

Almost every mobile or PC translation application provides only text translation (words or short sentences), but because of different situations, those “traditional” translation services cannot meet the needs of most travellers. Based on the survey, more than 80% of people prefer multiple methods (call, picture and audio) of translation service over text-only translation. Based on these results, Takeasy redesigned a creative new version of their translation app to include the major feature of live-human translation. Users can make an online call to directly connect to a professional translator anytime and anywhere, and they can also send text or pictures to the translator at the same time.

What’s more, only 20% of surveyed people, who have used “machine translation” service in his/her journey, think “traditional” translation app can really help them. While almost 50% have doubts on it, and 30% think “traditional” translation app is useless because of its poor accuracy.

Q: What is the major difference between Takeasy and other translation apps, like Google Translate? What is the advantage of Takeasy?

A：Actually, the brand new Takeasy app is completely different from other “traditional translation apps” with Instant Live-Human translation service.

First, the user interface is totally redesigned: translators and users will see different interfaces after login. Second, the most important feature of Takeasy is “one-tap to call/answer” without any other extra steps. Users or translator can easily be connected by just click a button in the app. Third, users can still send texts or images during the call, and this make it much easier for communication and solving problems directly.

Not only the travellers and also translators, they can directly talk with each other without typing even one letter. And the specific problems or issues of travellers will be solved during a simple chat. It is fantastic! While other “traditional translation apps”, even like Google Translate, still need users to type words or sentence for translation. And most of the “machine translation” cannot help with any specific issues during your travel.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: Takeasy want to make the translation industry “UBERlized” . We recruit translators in 50 countries over the world with multi-lingual abilities to provide live-human translation service now. On one hand, foreign travellers will have the opportunities to get a native speaker for language help at any time and any place; On the other hand, every translator will make a promising profit for answering every request from our users. In near future, there will be more translators and much more travellers around the world on our Takeasy platform. Translator will get reasonable reward for providing translation service, travellers/users will get highly and instantly live-human translation service at the same time. What’s more, this world will become a better place with the convenience of live-human translation.

Q: What kinds of feedback are you getting from users?

A: In a very short of time after the first brand new version launched, Takeasy got most feedbacks through emails and in-app feedback column. Also Takeasy got a series of 5-star-reveiw on Google Play Store from real users within just 2 weeks.

Here is a typical review: Most innovative app of the year. Professionals who travel a lot on business will use this app all the time to communicate. Its already a solid choice when I need to speak with friends abroad and get directions when I visit them!

Most of the feedbacks were focusing on the innovation & humanization part of live-human translation. Why? It gives them a totally different user experience when they want using a translation app.

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