Why do humans hate chatbots so much? In an April 27, 2021 article in Information Week, writer Lisa Morgan surmises that our hatred of chatbots comes down to language.

“Many chatbots communicate in English because it’s the most popular language in the world (when one considers native and non-native speakers),” Morgan writes. “In fact, there are 160 English dialects. Add to that acronyms, slang, jargon, and even generational variations in language and understanding the language becomes more complex. Worse, people don’t always say what they mean, which means the chatbot must understand what the user intended versus what they might have said.”

Given the fact that there are 160 English dialects and most of us are sloppy in the way we communicate with chatbots, it’s no wonder that a chatbot conversation with little or poor translation options ends with in frustrated customers. Now, imagine starting with messy content in Japanese or Urdu and expecting the chatbot to translate that into understandable English.

“If the source content is messy to begin with, you can’t really blame the translation engine for giving you a messy translation that’s nonsensical,” said Heather Morgan Shoemaker, co-founder and CEO of Language I/O (LIO). “Phase one of our approach to localization is to normalize the English, which enables the natural learning processing (NLP) engine to better apply that natural language to the set of intents and determine which intent is best suited to what we’ve translated. If the intents are in English and the chat coming in is Spanish, we normalize the Spanish and then machine translate the normalized Spanish so we can get a better translation into English.”

To read more about LIO’s chatbot translation technology, click here. Or, check out this fascinating Q and A with our Co-Founder and CEO Heather Morgan Shoemaker that was recently published in Authority magazine.

For more information about LIO’s products, click here.