German AI firm DeepL seeks bigger presence in Korea

The CEO of Germany-based artificial intelligence company DeepL affirmed the company’s vision to strengthen its presence in Korea by providing more advanced and accurate translation as a service -- DeepL Pro -- from August.

DeepL Pro is an advanced subscription-based service that allows users to take full advantage of in-house AI translation technology. It offers user-optimized web translation and the ability to integrate into algorithmic translation software, according to the CEO. In January, DeepL added Korean to its translation service offerings.

“We've been getting a lot of requests for Korean language support and when we finally launched the service, we were surprised to see more-than-expected interest from users,” the company’s founder and CEO, Jarek Kutylowski, said in a press conference at Josun Palace Hotel in southern Seoul on Tuesday.

"I was pretty excited to study how AI is being used and how people think about AI in Korea. ... Korea is known as a very tech-savvy country and a lot of people are excited about AI coming up and understand that AI will be used in in multitudes of applications," he added, explaining that the phenomenon pushed back the launch date for DeepL Pro here.

The German AI company looks to expand its footprint in the Korean market with an ultra-personalized translation service optimized to each company's language use, while fulfilling individual users’ needs.

Although the exact price of the subscription plan has not yet been unveiled, the upcoming DeepL Pro will include features such as unlimited text translation, enhanced document translation, application programming interface integration and the highest level of data security, Kutylowski said.

“DeepL has been founded as a company with the mission to break down language barriers in the world and we have been passionate about enabling people to communicate with each other without problems,” he said.

He also highlighted that DeepL translates texts through neural networks like other translation tools, but its improvement on the overall use of neural networks that learn from many translations allowed it to provide more natural yet accurate translation results.

“We will continue to evolve our service by providing accurate and unrivaled translations through our proprietary AI technology that captures and reflects nuances, unlike other services. ... We aim to help people around the world understand Korean products and various service experiences, as well as culture and history,” the CEO added.

The DeepL chief was confident that DeepL could meet Korean companies’ needs for overseas expansion, work productivity and efficiency improvement through the provision of the German firm’s quality services.

"We've seen that the Korean language is growing as fast as we've seen ever in the history of the DeepL service. (Since) there is a huge demand for translation in Korea, I expect Korea to become one of our top five markets in the future," Kutylowski said.

He also boasted of the AI translation tool's competitiveness against Google Translate and Naver's Papago, stressing the methods and purposes of training the company's AI models allowed it to serve translation services in the most accurate and consistent ways.

"Competing against big players in the market has been in the DNA since the advent of the company. ... Our advantages have been a lot of focus on solving a particular problem for our users and this allowed our research teams to be very effective. We've been competing with those big players already in the last five and six years and I'm very confident to continue (the competition)," he said.

As the German firm has built partnerships with various government bodies and global conglomerates around the world, Kutylowski expressed his hope that the firm will soon be able to start talks on DeepL solutions with governments and leading conglomerates in Korea as well.

Established in August 2017, DeepL supports 31 languages, including English, German, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese. It has 500,000 paid individual users and 20,000 corporate customers globally.