Language I/O (LIO) is a company that has built software enabling monolingual customer support teams to chat, email and provide self-service support in over 150 languages in real time. The company’s unique machine translation technology can get your team up and running with accurate, secure translations for your company and industry within 24 hours. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Language I/O CEO and founder Heather Shoemaker to learn more about the company.
Heather Shoemaker’s Background
Shoemaker’s background is rooted in a strong commitment to breaking barriers and succeeding in a male-dominated industry. And Shoemaker said:
“Initially, I aspired to join the Air Force and become a fighter pilot but was discouraged due to gender restrictions. This setback fueled my determination to thrive in challenging environments. I shifted gears, pursuing a collegiate running scholarship and obtaining a linguistics degree, where I mastered Spanish, Portuguese, and French.”
“My career began at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, where I applied my language skills. However, I yearned for more and blended my passion for science fiction with the tech boom, eventually earning a master’s in telecommunications. This led to a career as a software developer. Interestingly, I discovered that learning code paralleled learning a spoken language since are such highly technical pursuits.”
“Ultimately, this motivated me once I ventured out to create Language I/O (LIO) and our multilingual customer support technology.”
Formation Of Language I/O
How did the idea for the company come together? Shoemaker shared:
“The idea for LIO was born from a simple yet powerful vision. We wanted to empower global companies to break down language barriers for their customers by utilizing their existing monolingual support teams. Our journey began with a mission to facilitate seamless communication in any language. Today, we’re proud to offer multilingual customer support in over 150 languages, with our technology extending to email, articles, chat, and chatbot channels.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Shoemaker explained:
“At LIO, our mission is crystal clear: to provide the most secure and accurate real-time translation solution for businesses. Our software’s most common application is enabling monolingual support agents to communicate in real-time with customers in 150+ languages, all within the familiar environments of leading CRMs like Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. Our zero-trace policy ensures data security, and our innovative approach aggregates the world’s top machine translation engines, selecting the best one for each language pair and continuously enhancing company-specific translations.”
Challenges Faced
Has Shoemaker faced any specific bottlenecks in your sector of work recently? Shoemaker acknowledged:
“One of the specific bottlenecks we’ve faced recently is the competition posed by generative AI and LLMs, which has indeed introduced both challenges and opportunities for our industry. On the one hand, these technologies have the potential to streamline translation processes and improve efficiency, but on the other hand, they also present unique challenges that we must address. While they can generate translations quickly and at a relatively low cost, they often lack the nuance and cultural understanding that human translators provide.”
“Other recent challenges include maintaining translation quality, investing in technology, and addressing ethical concerns. As a multilingual translation company, we are actively working on these fronts to continue delivering high-quality translation services to our clients while embracing the benefits of evolving technology.”
Evolution Of LIO’s Technology
How has LIO’s technology evolved since launching? Shoemaker noted:
“LIO’s technology has evolved significantly since its inception in 2011. Initially, when LIO first began offering real-time, business-accurate translation services, there was a significant level of hesitation among companies to trust machine translation engines with their user-generated content (UGC) translations. However, over time, this skepticism has transformed into widespread acceptance.”
“In addition to this shift in trust, the company has observed a growing emphasis on security in recent years. Unlike the early days, when companies utilizing machine translation technology didn’t pay much attention to content security, today, they recognize the importance of zero-trace features in machine translation solutions.”
“Furthermore, there has been a more recent trend where customers and prospects are showing interest in whether the company’s solution incorporates generative AI. They are particularly concerned about ensuring that the integration of generative AI does not lead to a breach of their content. This highlights a heightened awareness of data security and privacy in the use of machine translation technology.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Shoemaker cited:
“In 2020, women-led startups received just 2.3% of VC funding. I founded LIO nearly ten years before that if that tells you anything about the journey it took to get to where we are today. So, the founding of LIO was a significant milestone in itself.”
“Our most recent milestones include being the first company invested in by Wyoming Business Council’s Wyoming Venture Capital (WYVC) Fund and receiving a 99.3% translation accuracy rating for our top languages. Other milestones include our Google Chrome extension, integrations with Salesforce and ServiceNow, and growing our fully remote team to over 50 members.”
“I’m particularly proud of our customer base and how it continues to grow, with a significant portion of our new clientele being situated in Europe. Presently, Europe accounts for around 22% of our customer distribution, while the United States makes up 70%, leaving the remaining 8% distributed across Oceania and Asia.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Shoemaker about customer success stories, she cited:
“In 2023, Elvie, the innovators behind hands-free and wearable breastfeeding solutions, recognized the pivotal importance of fast and precise cross-lingual communication with customers for achieving e-commerce success.
Through adopting our multilingual support system, Elvie has accomplished the following:
- 24/7 support to non-English speaking digital contacts, enabling greater agent resource flexibility.
- Adaptability and speed in onboarding new markets and languages.
- Significant improvements in CSAT and NPS.”
Funding
After asking Shoemaker about the company’s funding, she revealed:
“Language I/O’s total funds raised to date is $22.4 million, including an angel investment that was in an early pre-seed round. Our most recent Series A1 will be used to expand our machine learning (ML) team and platform that integrates generative AI to improve real-time translation quality and ultimately generate language-specific, LLM-powered chatbots.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Shoemaker affirmed:
“At Language I/O, we take great pride in our unique positioning among our competitors. First and foremost, our dedication to maintaining a zero-trace platform, even with sub-processors, is a testament to our unwavering commitment to data security. When you choose Language I/O for translation services, you can trust that any user-generated content is completely erased from our system and sub-processors upon translation completion, prioritizing your data’s privacy and security.”
“Our ISO 27001 certification, obtained in 2018, highlights our focus on customer data security, further reinforced by our compliance with PCI, GDPR, and CCPA standards.”
“Additionally, our rapid deployment capabilities, with teams up and running within 24 hours, are made possible through our innovative SIGLO platform, ensuring accuracy and security without the time-consuming task of individual neural model training.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Shoemaker concluded:
“We have some exciting things coming up at LIO, which include growing our machine learning (ML) team, introducing generative AI into our platform, and branching into the voice space.”
