Use Language AI, Like Smart Content™, to Enhance Content at Scale

How to put language AI to work for you to craft high-quality, resonant content that will give you a competitive advantage

Last updated: April 5, 2022 10:00PM

Content is a strategic asset. It helps companies build personal and lasting relationships with their customers to best their competition. It's vitally important to get your content right. In digital-first marketplaces, each point of communication — every email, landing page, or other piece of marketing collateral — must contain content that’s crisp, authentic to the brand, and resonant to the customer.

It is challenging to create effective content in one language. It becomes increasingly more difficult when companies operate in multiple markets, and they need to communicate in many languages and reach many target audiences. It is hard, but not impossible, to build content engines that address these needs. Moreover, successful content engines will enable companies to scale so they can cover even more languages. Language Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the game-changing technology that will help you meet these goals. Lionbridge’s Smart Content offering enables companies to capitalize on language AI.

How Does AI Help You Write Better Content?

Language AI, like Smart Content, improves content in ways that go beyond punctuation correction and spell-check. It can provide useful, contextual information about content. This includes information about domain, subject matter, style, complexity, and more. This type of information is useful to automate the content journey. It also provides content creators with important cues to help them deliver effective content faster.

To illustrate how Language AI works, take Lionbridge’s Smart Content offering as an example. It can assess content readability and identify non-inclusive language issues at the early stages of the content lifecycle. This provides content creators with an opportunity to address issues early in the cycle. That way, they will be able to avoid critical mistakes, shorten the review process, and reduce or eliminate heated discussions with local subsidiaries. Most importantly, the technology brings about more inclusive messages that are consistent with a company’s brand voice.

Improved content has numerous benefits: It resonates better with customers, removes friction from the localization process, shortens turnaround times, and reduces costs. As a result, content teams can focus on getting more content to customers. The benefits of language AI compound the more consistently a company implements language AI into their content lifecycles.

What Else Can Language AI Be Used For?

Language AI, like Smart Content, can also be used for content governance. It can detect issues at any stage of the content lifecycle. This helps prevent critical language issues from negatively impacting your customer’s digital experiences and your brand.

Thanks to Machine Learning, language AI can improve accuracy and detect new issues as more content passes through it. Until now, only professional proofreaders could deliver this type of service. Language AI’s ability to automatically flag issues at every stage of the content lifecycle creates the opportunity for brands to scale content operations without increasing costs and compromising on quality.

Sophisticated content companies, like Lionbridge, can leverage additional metadata in their localization platforms to make smart workflow and allocation choices. This ensures that each piece of content goes through an optimal process path and gets assigned to the best language expert.

How Does AI Impact Content Life Cycles and Help Businesses Grow?

AI has a profound impact on the content life cycle at every stage. It reduces language errors, increases customer satisfaction, and improves SEO metrics. Higher quality content reads better and engages target audiences more effectively. You’ll experience lower bounce rates, and people will spend more time on your pages. You’ll eventually end up with higher conversion rates. All these benefits create a foundation for business growth.

When companies make language AI part of their content journey, they can scale faster and keep costs in check. This allows them to reach more customers across more languages and markets.

Making AI part of any content engine is easier than ever, but companies must take some things into consideration when selecting the right solution for their business:

Connectivity — Determine whether it will be easy to connect the AI to your CMS or any other place where your content lives. Simply put, the solution needs to be able to easily extract your content from its originating system, connect it to the right place for processing, and return it to its originating system in a seamless manner. Learn more about our approach to connectivity through our Lionbridge Language Cloud platform.
Data to train the AI — Look into the solution’s data repository. AI is only as good as the data it has been built on. The larger the data repository, the better the AI engines will be trained. Also, your brand data, such as specific terminology, glossary, and style guides, must be used to teach AI how to put forth your unique brand voice. Lionbridge can provide the utmost AI training because it has the largest, most curated language data repository on the marketplace.
Scalability — Investigate whether the solution has a modern localization platform that can scale and adapt to your needs. Content and localization platforms need to adjust and provide support as you scale and your content teams produce more content.
Access to the best translators — Find out who will be handling the content. AI helps automate many mundane tasks, but content will really shine when AI is combined with the best language community. Members will deliver superb performance across all languages and content types.

Why is AI, Alone, Unable To Deliver Excellent Results?

It can be tempting to solely rely on AI, given its ability to enhance the content lifecycle. This approach might work well for low visibility or less important content streams. However, you will achieve the best results by combining AI automation with human supervision. AI will automate the mundane work while Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and proofreaders will refine the content. These people will provide the added flair that’s needed to resonate with your target audiences.

AI is essential to automate repetitive, low-value tasks and enable translators make better use of their time and talent. AI brings focus to the process and shifts attention to where it is needed the most. This helps increase speed and enables teams to handle more content.

How Can You Localize Everything With Smart Content?

Since localization began, companies have had to prioritize their content to stay within their budgets. This has meant they’ve had to compromise on their content strategy. However, in the last few years, tremendous progress has been made in the field of Language AI, especially in Natural Language Generation (NLG) and Machine Translation (MT). For the first time ever, companies have access to a full suite of content technologies. This enables them to scale their content engines without incurring major costs and accomplish things that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

Now, instead of having to select a limited amount of content for localization, companies can localize everything. EVERYTHING. Language AI, such as Smart Content, brings focus and brand consistency to your content. It reduces friction between content creation and localization teams and allows you to achieve higher content velocity. It is easier than ever to venture into new markets and get a foothold before deciding to make large investments. MT technology, which is improving every year, is changing the localization cost equation and enables companies to push more content to market than ever.

Today, companies must contend with powerful market forces that make buyers evermore sophisticated and demanding in their buyer behaviors. Buyers expect superb, flawless, and consistent Digital Experiences (DX) across all channels. They want to have consistent experiences when they interact with brands — whether those experiences are via an app, website, support chat, with a real person, or an in-store retail experience. In today’s digital-first, hyper-connected world, providing outstanding experiences is no longer an option; it is essential for sustained growth.

Businesses must find ways to personalize content for more narrowly defined target groups, across more channels, markets, and languages. This means creating content at scale, while hitting quality marks and ensuring brand voice consistency. Inevitably, these demands will further create pressures on legacy localization and content creation processes and technology. The old way of doing things makes it harder to achieve greater content velocity. Implementing Smart Content as part of your content lifecycles will help alleviate pressure and enable you to scale your content engines.