Flex workspace offerings have grown rapidly in every market, region, and country on the planet.
Even if 1.35 billion humans can speak English, it’s said that only 360 million do so comfortably as their first language. So, if 95% of the world speaks another first language, it’s highly likely that many many operators and computer engineers may prefer to use their own language to describe workspaces, inventory, and availability.
Even before we began welcoming the first operators and platforms to start leveraging our data-syncing infrastructure, we knew that we’d need to teach the platform to understand multiple languages pretty quickly.
This post dives into how we’re approaching the challenge, what it means for integrated platforms, and what may come next.
The 3 fundamental building blocks.
The University of North Carolina shares that when learning a new language there are three main building blocks:
- comprehensible input (ie hearing or reading and understanding)
- comprehensible output (ie speaking or writing and being understood)
- feedback (ie improving from mistakes)
We’re using these building blocks to teach our data-syncing algorithms to understand more languages so that our unified API can connect and sync with even more solutions around the world.
Step 1. Comprehending input.
From today, every Syncaroo-synced location has the option to select their language.
This tiny change helps Syncaroo’s algorithms recognize and then learn “how to read and understand” the language. And this all happens before forwarding instructions to integrated and connected systems in English.
This means that each platform given access to that location’s dataset, will continue to receive updates, and be able to sync back bookings, in English – even if an operator’s central inventory system or their database schema is in another language.
Up next: Output & improvements.
This upgrade to how our algorithm ‘learns’ lays the framework for a whole trove of new capabilities.
From advanced and on-the-fly computations to translations, to other capabilities designed to help operators seamlessly automate tasks across their favorite apps, tools, and teams.
In short, once Syncaroo learns to understand new language inputs, we’re keen to teach the system how to speak, write and even improve through feedback loops in other languages.
This will make Syncaroo’s reliable and universal API even more powerful for all integrated platforms and services.
