21st October. London, UK – A package of major updates to the real-time interpretation app Speechly was announced today. Immediately available, the batch of new features includes 11 new languages, regional accents, and a conference call add-on. These new tools will make Speechly even more useful to businesses, public sector bodies, and other organisations that rely on translation and interpretation services.

Speechly was launched in 2020 and works by capturing audio from a speaker in one language then using artificial intelligence software to interpret it instantaneously into a second language. It then produces an audio file which the listener can hear. They can then respond in their own language.

Speechly initially offered real-time interpretation for 35 global languages, but after today’s update, that number has risen to 46. The new languages available are Estonian, Gujarati (India), Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay (Malaysia), Maltese, Marathi (India), Swahili (Kenya), and Vietnamese.

The update will help international businesses, border officials, healthcare workers, police, journalists, academics and many other professionals communicate with more people around the world.

Another update to make the app more user-friendly is an accents feature. While people from different countries might speak the same language, it can be confusing to hear the dialogue in a very different accent to one’s own.

Speechly will now let listeners of some languages hear the audio in their country’s accent. There is now regional accent audio available for English (American, Australian, British and Canadian), Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) Spanish (Spain, Argentina, Colombia) and French (France, Canada).

Another new feature released as part of the update package is a conference call add-on. The Speechly app can now be installed on Windows laptops, then launch with desktop conference call services like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. This will allow customers to use Speechly within popular unified communications tools. The current update allows 1:1 translation, but the company plans to support interpretations from one to many languages in the near future.

Commenting on the update, Speechly CCO Nick Davies said: “Our users told us they wanted to use the app in more languages and hear speech in their own accents. We’ve been working closely with our customers to keep improving the product, so it closely matches their needs. This product update demonstrates our commitment to making Speechly the most useful real-time interpretation app on the market”.