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Enhancing Player Experiences with Language AI with Dominick Kelly
237 Plays2 years ago
This episode of Player Engage explores the necessity of localizing games to provide an enjoyable player experience. Dominic Kelly stresses that players seek games in their own language and are more likely to choose localized games over non-localized ones. He advises companies to prioritize localization based on market potential, player preferences, and overall experience. The discussion highlights the significance of language translation in retaining and engaging players.
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Transcript
Introduction to Player Engage Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Player Engage podcast where we dive into the biggest challenges, technologies, trends, and best practices for creating unforgettable player experiences. Player Engage is brought to you as a collaboration between Keywords Studios and HelpShift. Here is your host, Greg Posner. Welcome to the Player Engage podcast and we have another special episode today.
Meet Dominic Kelly
00:00:20
Speaker
Today we're going to be focusing on another technology that we have here at Keywords and HelpShift and I'm joined by
00:00:26
Speaker
My colleague and my friend, Dominic Kelly, he's the director of technology for this technology called Language.ai. And Dom, you want to do a quick introduction of yourself and who you
Dominic's Experience in Language Technology
00:00:35
Speaker
are? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rick. And thanks for having me on the podcast.
00:00:38
Speaker
So I've been in language technology now for the guts of about 20 years and I've been in the Givens family for about three. I focus on everything AI, a lot of it. So machine learning, machine translation, content management systems, also working with other technologies and integrating them as part of the customer engagement team. So any kind of technologies that touch the customer,
00:01:03
Speaker
I have to get a little bit involved within the globalized service line, so when it comes to localization translation testing.
Services Offered by Keywords Studios
00:01:10
Speaker
So for people that are listening, I may not be familiar with keywords. Let's give a high level understanding that keywords is broken into three parts. Create does what you think they create games from scratch, from nothing to creating a full working game, whatever you need help with. We then have the globalized division, which will help translate as well as provide QA services for companies. And then we have the engaged service line, which is actually the customer support side of things. And we can help with community management. So.
00:01:37
Speaker
When it comes to machine translation, that's falling under our globalize because it's helping translate your game as well as engage because it's helping agents translate real-time text into their native language so you can help support multiple languages even if you only know one language. My question to Dom is an interesting one is, why should companies when you're building a game be interested in localizing
Importance of Localization for Player Retention
00:02:01
Speaker
a game? Why spend money there? Why focusing on providing different languages if you're building your game?
00:02:08
Speaker
I want to flip the question for you. All right. So why? Because these these are always very simple way. Podcasts always give you the questions are sometimes good flipping. So the real question shouldn't be why are you doing it? Is this what your customers do or your players do when they can't play the game in the language that they use every day? That's the question to answer. What do they do? Are they going to games generally that are in their languages first?
00:02:37
Speaker
More than likely, if they have any issues or challenges or problems with it, what are they going to do? They're going to dump it for something that's better or something that's local for them. So when you want to compete, you have to compete.
00:02:49
Speaker
with the understanding that players have so much choice today. There's more games produced today than anywhere, right? There's games on your mobile phone and games everywhere. So if they're not easy to use, easy to access, and they've made the player feel that they're part of the community, then they're not going to play them.
00:03:11
Speaker
And you're trying to retain those players, you're trying to retain those users. And that's why localisation is the most important part, because you want to make people feel like they're part of that community and translation and language is the fundamental thing. Because if you don't speak their language,
00:03:26
Speaker
they ain't going to stay. And that's generally what I see. Now, of course, it's when you're looking at localisation, you should also consider things like, you know, oh, okay, well, how much money are you going to make out of that market? Not to say that money should be the only reason why, but that is a reason. And you might also want to say, well, maybe, you know, that English proficiency in that particular region is quite good. So therefore, maybe we don't translate
00:03:53
Speaker
straight away until we see how good the game is because often you know translation localisation isn't cheap it's a service you have to work on so yeah when you're thinking about it I would always say think about the player first think about the experience you want to give them and then work backwards so that means then looking at the cost for it so you know that for example that your main focus for a particular title might be France
00:04:16
Speaker
and for that reason you should definitely translate into French and then you might want to add more languages in the future but that's you know that's how I would take it you know everywhere your player is playing the game you should be able to provide the language and if you don't you should have a really good reason for why because they'll ask you
00:04:34
Speaker
I love that point. And, you know, it's, it's interesting, right? Because there is a ton of competition out there these days, right? You're playing a match three game. And just because you're the biggest match three game in town, if I'm not immersed in the game, if I'm not feeling it, if you're not providing the support or tools in my local language,
00:04:51
Speaker
I'm just going to download another copy of the game and it's easy for me to say because I'm an English speaking player and most games are available in English but you bring up the point of monetary value and you don't necessarily,
Factors in Game Translation
00:05:03
Speaker
you do want to think about it. We can say we don't want to but you do, right? And the English market may not be the most profitable market for a game. There's other markets out there that are going to bring your
00:05:11
Speaker
bring you more money than the English speaking crowd. So is that something you talk about with customers when you're that about what markets might be the best markets for you to go into? Or is that something that they're primarily making a decision on on their own? Well, we talked to them about that. It depends on what kind of level of relationship you have with the customer, right? Because some of them, they just fire and forget, they give it to us and they ask us to do a service and we provide the service.
00:05:34
Speaker
But that's fine. And in other cases that we provide technology as well, so the AI stuff, in other cases we provide services and technology, so we do... Where we're at, we're at the partnership level, where we're doing all that kind of stuff. The conversations are more at that level where we're saying to them, okay, so you're launching your game across all these different languages and these different markets.
00:05:57
Speaker
And then we talked about culturalization, so is your game applicable for that market? Have you considered that you can't use blood here or the cultural aspects? If you're using Nordic gods in your game, for example, is that okay to do that for
00:06:12
Speaker
Things out in the UAE maybe not because there's some gods that conflict with with their religious beliefs so you have to have these kind of conversations about you know ethically and culturally is that game suitable for launching it and why you should translate it and maybe you should change things for it so in the source content before you actually
00:06:30
Speaker
localize and then when you localize understanding the impact and making sure you always have a story for anything that might be controversial or funny or whatever it is because every time you try to be funny there's always someone that stands around and says that's not funny I'm offended so you have because of that you have to make sure you have a story right that this is why we did it and these are the reasons why if you don't have a story for why you've got a certain cultural um let's say adaptation or whatever it is and you don't have a story then you're generally going to offend a hell of a lot more people
00:07:00
Speaker
Definitely have your stories and have your logic in place. We do speak about that. We also speak about then, for example, when a game won't be running for five or six years, and they've localised it into four or five languages, it's doing quite well, but they've noticed that, I don't know, let's say the Vietnamese market, there's a small amount of players playing it,
00:07:22
Speaker
They might say, well, you know what, maybe to generate revenue or maybe to increase our user base out there. We haven't done anything yet. Maybe they've got some DLCs they're working on that could be quite interesting for that region. So therefore localize at that point. And now it gives you access to a new market, a new set of players. You can expand your player base and that region too. So there's things like that we talk about as well.
00:07:44
Speaker
where a game has got to its peak and now it's slowly tapering off and now they're trying to figure out other ways to get some of those players back into the game or attract new players from different markets.
00:07:59
Speaker
and we see a lot of those conversations but that's always at the partnership level not on the far and forget cards because they just they give it to us and say off you go. All right those are your fifas right your fifas you're mad into games that are just hey we just need another language we know what we're doing here but you bring up a good point a little earlier is well not a good point but one I want to build upon is you said a little later in the game life cycle when hey this game's starting to tamper down maybe we want to try and hit up a new market but
00:08:25
Speaker
From the perspective of building a game as an engineer, is it easier for me to do it before the game launches because it's lightweight, it might be a little smaller, or does it not make a difference to the stage my game's
Technical Considerations in Localization
00:08:36
Speaker
in? It's the same process to implement something like this.
00:08:39
Speaker
Well, when you're localizing, you do have different factors, right? So like, um, for example, font sizes and, you know, cultural things and stuff like that, that you might have to change in terms of your source content, whether it's. So yes, you do need to consider localization and translation in the beginning. Um, for example, the worst thing you don't want to find out is that someone's hard coded load of strings in your game. And when you go to localize it, then you translate everything into Arabic and then 20% of it is left in English and you're like, Oh, what happened here? And that only happens at the very end.
00:09:09
Speaker
And because it's happened at the very end, then your delay to launching that game in that market becomes quite big. So the idea is to shift things left in the process where you can. So where you can detect things early, where you can detect things sooner, where you can start to gather the information about what you're doing, the quicker you can start to deploy fixes so that at the end or at the right of the process, as we like to say, where time is tighter and things are tougher to get done, and budget's often tighter too,
00:09:39
Speaker
you don't end up putting the pressure there. So try to shift things left. So when you're looking at localization, when you're looking at testing, when you're looking at QA, when you're looking at all this kind of stuff for globalization of a game, you should always try to get it involved as early as possible, embed the people in your teams if you can do that, and get that stuff sooner rather than later. So yeah, if you can do it. One particular thing is like Japanese, for example, is a double white language. So
00:10:03
Speaker
you know if you wonder why sometimes a game might run a little slower because well it takes twice the amount of memory for Japanese and silly things like that that you know like you might not even consider or for example that you're gaining maybe all the text that it doesn't display right to left correctly so therefore now you really shouldn't be doing Arabic because you need to re-engineer maybe part of your game engine so there might be things in terms of localization that will highlight
00:10:30
Speaker
limitations or problems you might have in the actual game itself. So you might have what you call lock engineering issues that you need to fix that are for the developer to fix but for the lock engineers to help them fix them if that makes sense.
00:10:43
Speaker
I think what's fascinating to me there is that I never really put thought into, Hey, different languages need different types of memory because of how much processing power is going to need to compete. Uh, like that that's fascinating to me. It's something I would have never really even thought about it. And it's something that I guess people should be aware of because you don't want your game to be clunky just because it's running a different language. You still want that smooth experience. So how do you make sure that's happens? And I know it's just a factor I never really thought about would play a big role in this.
Testing for Language and Cultural Performance
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah. You got to think about it.
00:11:12
Speaker
All the things you can think about, you know, like if you're launching a game and, you know, for example, you've only tested it, for example, on stream, and, you know, you haven't tested it then on any of the applications that might be out in Asia, and that's a mark that you're going to go after, then you're going to lead yourself up to a bit of a failure there, right? You know, that it might not perform as you expect it to, so you might look at the users that you expect it to. So always try to put yourself in the players' shoes, always try to consider the cultural aspects, the performance aspects,
00:11:41
Speaker
I'm playing a game in that region so language is any part of it localization and part of it you know testing is key to all of it as well so make sure everything runs correctly so that's I think a big difference with keywords and you know the life we need here is that we are all pretty much working in games 24 hours a day seven days a week.
00:12:00
Speaker
So we understand what it means to build a game and launch a game. And like you said, with the code dev and the crate guys, they're creating stuff and they're code dev'ing stuff and they're doing artwork and we hear the stories of stuff before. Well, we don't hear the stories because they can't tell us, but after they've launched and we start to see the stuff being released, we start to go, okay, well that was part of us and we did that and that's really quite cool.
00:12:25
Speaker
So because we live and breathe it from beginning to end, we see a lot of the good things and we see a lot of the bad things. And when we aren't that partnership level with customers, it's good to be able to say, look, we learned these things, we can share them with you. And it might help your game be more successful if you're running on a tight budget to launch a game. Or if you've got a certain amount of investment and you need to make a return investment for it quickly, then you need to make sure you spend your money in the right places.
00:12:52
Speaker
You know, you want to make sure the players get what they need as well. I have a two part question here and you have to excuse my ignorance for understanding how engineering or development work.
00:13:03
Speaker
If I am building a game, right? And I want to translate it and I build it in English and I want to translate it into French. Boom. I sign up for language AI. What is the lift to actually setting it up from my perspective? And then maybe a year down the line, I say, you know what? I want this game to be in Finnish too and Dutch as well. Is it because I've already done it from English to French? Is it a lot easier to then just say, Hey, add this language at this language? Or are we talking about a whole new engagement?
00:13:31
Speaker
Well, you're going to get a load of things you've learned from one language to another language. So like we have languages that are in the same family, like romance family, so on and so forth.
00:13:40
Speaker
where a lot of the things are going to be similar. You're going to run into similar problems. Then you're going to have problems which are more for the right to left languages and so on. There's quite a few families of languages that once you've done one, it does help you understand what to do for the other ones. That's true. In terms of language AI and the technology and the solution, fundamentally, you need data. If you want to use machine translation, artificial intelligence, you need data. That means people will always be needed from the get-go in the beginning.
00:14:08
Speaker
If you don't have any data, then you need to build the data. If you don't have any data already built, then you need the humans to create that data. So they might be, for example, translating the first maybe versions of the game until we have enough data to build and customize an engine that is good enough for you to be able to use. And what we always do is we use a thing called TUR, which is called Translation Error Rate. So this is basically where we look at a human translation, we look at a machine translation, and we compare the two and say,
00:14:38
Speaker
What editing would you have to do on this machine translation to get it to this human translation? That's your productivity. When that productivity tipping point from the engine goes, whoop, OK, so it's really, really good. The engine makes sense. That means you start using it, and that means you get productivity gains. You can do things faster. You can produce more translations quickly, and so on and so forth. So you have to do this on a language by language level.
00:15:02
Speaker
So every language is a learning curve. So you should be expecting to spend more money in the beginning to collect the data. And then as the game evolves and you may be doing, you know, you're halfway through and you have enough space to build an engine, you might see some of those costs kind of come down and also some of the speeds increase because you've got the data. If you're part of a franchise,
00:15:20
Speaker
And you're doing one game and another game and another game. Oh, language, I love that. Because you have huge amounts of data to use, it will gobble it up, and you can do some really great stuff. And often, you can create engines for particular content types, like one just specialized for French in-game content, one just specialized for your marketing content, one just specialized for dialogue, because all that content is very different. So you have differences on a language level.
00:15:44
Speaker
to build an AI and then in a language you'll have content types within that language. So you have mainly marketing, in-game and dialogue are the three ones that you tend to see. So yeah, a lot of customization, a lot of data manipulation, you know, and trying to get the best out of them. But we tend to use the TERS call to manage the productivity because it's the easiest one to be able to say.
00:16:08
Speaker
is what we're doing, making a difference and is actually having a positive impact on it because you shouldn't use AI for the sake of using AI. You should always make sure that it is productive. That's a key thing.
00:16:23
Speaker
And that's gonna lead us into questions and not quite yet about kind of the rise of generative AI and that. But before I go there, so just again for understanding how the tool works, right?
Translation Methods in Gaming
00:16:35
Speaker
If I'm playing Marvel Strike Force, right? And there's a saying like, Hey, here comes Spider-Man, right? Is it translated
00:16:44
Speaker
real time like is it then like if i'm playing in spanish is it going to translate it real time or is it already programmed into the game for all the languages needed that's a good question so so generally um that's already translated um and so that's really translating so usually you know when you build a game you've you've built it you've created all your assets it's in something maybe like git performance version something where you have like a repo with all your assets in it
00:17:09
Speaker
and that content then will come out. It will have a branch, you know, for when you're building it and launching it, and it'll have a branch for maybe when you're localizing it, maybe two branches for when you localize assets. And that stuff will get pushed out to keywords for localization.
00:17:23
Speaker
If we have an engine already there, they're great. If we have human translation assets in a database, that's great, because then what we'll do is we'll take whatever you send us, leverage what we've already translated, apply the machine translation on top of it, and then have our human process step in where we post-edit that using our professional linguists who know the game, who've played the game, or familiar with the game.
00:17:44
Speaker
and they posted it and then it goes to a reviewer and that person is also like an expert you might say like a language expert for that particular IP and they then review it and then it goes back so what you end up having is still people in the process but the localization part
00:18:01
Speaker
tends to be a lot tighter because you can now provide all the content translated, whether that be partly machine translated and AI, and also leverage from the work you've already translated in the past with humans. So we try to leverage the both to maximize the speed, you know, and there's no point sending stuff to a machine if it's humans already done it as well.
00:18:21
Speaker
So here's where I want to try and trap you and get you in a corner here. Why is this machine learning? I mean, text has been translated for years.
Role of Machine Learning in Translation
00:18:31
Speaker
I can go to Google. I could type in translate this from Spanish to English or translate. Like what's the machine learning aspect of all this? Yeah. So Google is what they call like, you know, uh, miles, miles, miles wide, but only inches deep. Uh, so it has a lot of data, but not much wisdom.
00:18:51
Speaker
And as the wise man would say, you know, to turning information into wisdom is tricky. And generally people, you know, have that ability. So AI doesn't really have the ability to do that. You know, at the moment what AI tends to do is it will go out there, grab whatever it can, and then try to formulate a response it thinks you want. Now, that doesn't tell you what you need to know all the time. It tells you what it thinks you want.
00:19:16
Speaker
Right? And that's the hard part. The disinformation, misinformation has AI at the minute, right? This is the challenge with it. So you have to make sure when you customize and train an engine, you feed it the right data, you feed it the right information, you get it to understand the context of what kind of thing it's tackling. So we say machine translation, yes, okay. There's an AI model inside of it that's learning the language and the nuances of what you do, you feed it.
00:19:40
Speaker
But it's not, I'd say, artificial intelligence as in it's automatically understanding what you're saying to it, and then creating a response based on true understanding of what you've asked it and giving it back to you. It's not doing that in real time. There is a lot of machine translations that are learning, but yeah, you have to give it context. It's really, really important. So you always still need some kind of human in the loop. Unless you've trained the engine very, very well,
00:20:08
Speaker
and it understands the context, like, for example, in player support. So in player support, you have very small, short, fast turnaround times that you need something instant that will work. So you need to make sure you feed it a lot of small chats. You need to feed it a lot of that kind of dialogue for it to get an understanding of how humans interact.
00:20:25
Speaker
Right, and it's normally quick. It's not 500 like Elder Scrolls 9 million words, for example, someone said right massive amounts of content with huge amount of context and you know you can't you can't really feed an engine to that and expected to get the context 99% of the time, or to the point where the player isn't going to spot.
00:20:45
Speaker
all the problems and the context challenges that the machine will not spot and therefore that's why you're definitely the humans in the loop. So where it comes learning, it's the data you feed it and the cleaning process and giving it to the engine. That's the machine learning part. So yeah, you know, AI is overused a lot. There is an AI model which learns, but
00:21:08
Speaker
It's machine learning is the process really. There's very few true artificial intelligent technologies out there that actually are thinking for themselves. And if there are, please send me some because I need a few because instead of hiring people, I can just use AI.
00:21:26
Speaker
It's a lot easier. I just get AI to create. I can't just type that in somewhere. They're not there yet. If they were, I'd be using them. They're not there yet. You still need people. People in combination with machines that are intelligent or give perceived intelligence,
00:21:44
Speaker
That's where the future is right now. Many people now are using technologies to augment or to aid what they're doing, to help what they're doing, to remove some of the menial tasks that they're doing. That's really kind of where AI and machine learning is kind of stepping in now. You know, where, for example, before people were right, you know, there was always someone designated to take notes. Now most things are dictated, they're recorded, and you have your notes created for you automatically.
00:22:07
Speaker
Mine will be perfect, but at least you have 65% of the donkey work done, so now someone only spends 15 minutes collating an hour and a half meeting notes. This kind of thing is useful, right? But for an AI to truly understand a game, that's not possible yet. There's AI that we're working with Mighty, which is an acquisition that we got back in the beginning, end of last year, sorry.
00:22:31
Speaker
where basically what we're doing is the AI really, or the bots should we say, they play the game. So they have to understand all the events that go on in the game, all the player actions that go on in the game, and they play the game. And what that means is that not having to sit through every single screen in order to work out where text is and stuff like that, this bot now goes through and does this for you, and it starts to triage information. It won't tell you
00:22:56
Speaker
what the bug is or what the problem is and stuff like that, but it will help identify the things that the humans now need to take intelligent action on. So that's the key part, that the AI and the machines and the automation is really augmenting the workload for the humans and helping us basically focus on the parts where we add value, all that will pose the biggest risk to what we're trying to achieve. So in other words, this case is making sure the game plays well.
00:23:25
Speaker
And then, of course, when we have a bot doing that, that's collating a huge amount of data. So now we have all the screenshots. Now we have exactly where the events happened. Now we have that. We can feed that into localization. Now what happens is when our translators work, and they have the machine translation, they have the image, they have the context of where it belongs. Now they know how to translate it correctly. Whereas before, if you were to ask a publisher, where does this string belong in this game? They're like, we think it's here.
00:23:53
Speaker
they're not sure themselves, because like I said, it could be a massive amount of data. So having this information that we can provide in terms of the automation feeds it through. So this whole machine learning process, I think it's more about machines are there to design, that machines should be designed to give context to humans to help us make smart decisions. I don't think AI should be making decisions for us.
00:24:19
Speaker
you know that's not where i want to be because i prefer having my own two hands and my own understanding of reality robot ai surgeons i mean i trust that maybe more than the human hand who knows but uh there's a few things you mentioned that i kind of want to build upon which is interesting to me
00:24:37
Speaker
Uh, the first one being that the machine learning then is really just taking in the context of the game, understanding what's actually happening in the game. So it could provide the right type of translation. Just not just one-to-one, as you mentioned, Google is great, but it's very shallow. It's, it's no as thieves. It's no, it says it's not personal like that where, where the model is different. You also interestingly brought up mighty and mighty for again, listeners may not know they're a QA platform. That's part of keywords.
00:25:03
Speaker
It does this really cool automated game testing, no more grandma's boy kind of game testing, if you're familiar with that.
Automated Testing and Quality Assurance
00:25:09
Speaker
But you mentioned earlier that sometimes you'll translate Arabic and there'll still be some English characters that exist throughout the game. Is that something that you can automate with your QA testing tools? Hey, look for any errors that might exist within the. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly it. So if you imagine like, let's say you have a medium sized game, 50,000 trees.
00:25:29
Speaker
That's a medium-sized game. So if you have 50,000 strings, that could be thousands of different UIs. Maybe it's only one UI, which is great. That would be a big UI. But generally, it's going to be spread across a lot of different parts of the game. And you then have to have someone sit there and go through and test it all. Now, that's absolutely fine. If it's in English, you probably won't notice they're hard-coded. Do you know why? Because you haven't had to do anything to the text.
00:25:57
Speaker
The second you have to localize it and you have to edit that text, you start to go, oh, that's been hard coded. Oh, that's here. That's there. So this is where localization sometimes, as I mentioned, it can kind of highlight the things that you may have missed when you've been putting the game together in terms of like how the text is structured.
00:26:14
Speaker
So that's why, you know, it's great that Mighty does this because you can go through and it can indicate a lot of stuff. It can say, you know, this has actually been translated, you know, correctly. Also, the proofbot technology, which is the part of technology I'm really interested in, is that what it does is it actually tells you this has been translated and it's actually French.
00:26:35
Speaker
So it can tell you that it's French and it can say the text in the image is the same as the text in the game. So in other words, the text we've localised and the text that's in the game is the same. So it can give you the confidence score, which is really useful. It's not going to tell you it's right. It's going to tell you it's in context.
00:26:51
Speaker
But it's going to give you some kind of confidence score. So once again, giving the context and triaging the data for a human to make a smart decision on the actual stuff. That's the beauty of it. And that proof bot bit is a part of the test bot. So they have build bot, which builds the game, makes sure the game is not broken. They have test bot, which plays the game. So it takes the role of the player, goes through and plays the whole game. And then have proof bot, which is kind of like a weird guy that sits in the background and just takes pictures of everything.
00:27:28
Speaker
And that's the bit that I'm like, for an AI person,
00:27:35
Speaker
the more data you collect earlier on in the stage, understanding what all those artificial players are doing, that should be great for understanding what real players will do. That would be great for understanding how we can pass things through for localisation. That's great for understanding generally how the game will play. If you ever wanted to realise as well, at that point you can say, what would happen if we had 10,000 players in the game right now playing this part?
00:27:57
Speaker
Well, chuck a load of box in it, and it'll give you the idea. So, asking those kind of questions and trying to figure out what performance might be, you know, when you're doing your English or French or German versions, this kind of technology is really useful. So, yeah, it's relatively new to the group, but we're all quite happy about it. And, you know, I think also working at how we can feed this into other parts and other technologies in the group, you know, is part of my job as well. So, that's going to be my life, I think, for the next year or two.
00:28:27
Speaker
So let's go to that because this is where it gets exciting for me personally, right? And I, as being a sales engineer for the HelpShift side of things, we for who are listeners who aren't familiar with HelpShift, we provide a platform that allows to provide customer service so agents can communicate on our platform directly with your players or your users.
Real-Time Translation in Customer Support
00:28:47
Speaker
And where it used to be, you'd manually have to copy and paste
00:28:51
Speaker
text if you want to translate it to a different language. We've now taken this language AI model and built it into our dashboard, allowing you as an agent to translate any inbound message to whatever language you speak. So if you have a bunch of English speaking agents, you can have a global game that players can speak whatever native language they want. And keeping with that player experience, making sure the player feels immersed, we can translate the text for the agent to be Spanish to English and then the agent can reply in English and translate to Spanish.
00:29:19
Speaker
All in real time. It's super cool. It's a great way. And English is one thing, but if you want to, say, put your support in Manila or somewhere else that maybe is a little cheaper, they can all speak English. What was the decision to integrate that into Helpshift? I mean, it seems like common sense. So you might just say, yeah, Greg, it's common sense. But like, it makes a lot of sense. And it's something at Helpshift we wanted for years. And it's not until we became part of the Keywords family that this happened. But how did this get called out, I guess, for lack of better words?
00:29:47
Speaker
Well, we were, you know, we were working, before I helped you for Kim Park, it was family, myself and a few of the group in AI guys. Like, you know, we need to do this kind of thing. We need to integrate into support because where are our customers interacting with their players? Where are our clients interacting with their players the most? And customer engagement is one of them. And one of the biggest real, like, things that upset me was there are so many players playing the game that have problems. And they don't want to, they don't even want to respond
00:30:16
Speaker
when they have a problem because they know that the response they're going to get is going to be in English and they can't direct their answers effectively or they can't have an effective communication. And what that basically means is that they play the game for a little while, if it's any way buggy at all, they believe.
00:30:31
Speaker
And that's the challenge where you don't have that kind of player support in multiple languages. And it kind of frustrated me, because I have a lot of Polish friends and Russian friends, and I know all around the world, right? And every language that you're speaking, sometimes you get good support and bad support. And the majority of the thing, being Irish and being able to speak English is great, because generally we get supported all the time for everything, everywhere.
00:30:56
Speaker
which is fine, right? But that was the main reason why I got called out, you know, that we need to be doing it. And in companies that deploy a solution like this, if you're doing a follow the sun model that players have been playing anywhere all the time, that means you need to have a facility geographically placed to have people. And then you have to make sure that those geographic places have the right resources because it's very hard to find
00:31:24
Speaker
I know French and Korean linguists or people that can speak their language combinations in France, it's very hard to find German and Ukrainian speakers in the Philippines, so on and so forth. So it's like, where do you put these people? That means you might have to have several people, you have to have people working remotely and on site and so forth. So it becomes all complicated, right?
00:31:49
Speaker
And the huge amount of money investment basically means that people didn't bother. And that's where you leave that situation in the beginning. We end up with don't provide the support.
00:31:58
Speaker
The idea is simply use the machine to augment the human again, right? So you have the agent, they can sit there, they can be anywhere in the world. And rather than also have like agents that are sitting there, for example, they handle French and they only handle French. So that means you have agents sitting there doing nothing until the French issue start coming in.
00:32:19
Speaker
and then they start working and then all of a sudden you've got loads of Mexican guys who are working over there doing Latin American Spanish and they don't get any tickets right now so they're doing nothing so all of a sudden you have like these agents that they go through really high peak times and times where there's no tickets right so so then you have to you know kind of watch and look about staffing so when you take language out of that mix what does that do that immediately goes right how many tickets regardless of language
00:32:48
Speaker
do I need to process? Now and at peak times, how many agents do I need to cover that amount of issues? There you go. Now you just basically streamline your thinking of exactly how you need to support your customers because language doesn't become a barrier. If you can put the AI there, it removes language as the barrier completely. And then you start really thinking about how you staff. And then also those people
00:33:16
Speaker
Those are the people who are doing the tickets all the time and the knowledge retention and the ability for them to understand the game. They stick around longer. They will be doing more hours, so they're probably going to get paid more as well. So this is all good things. And then when you plug that into something like HelpShift, which is such a fantastic tool for working inside applications and providing support for customers that they don't have to go outside to a different application to start doing requests.
00:33:43
Speaker
they start to get that feeling that the player actually gets the feeling that they are actually being supported. And that means they're engaged and that means they play more and they don't have to wait, you know, like five hours for a response. They can get a response in five seconds because you've got the agents there. You can do the language anytime, anywhere. And that's really the fantastic bit about it. So it shifted the thinking, you know? And then like you said, Greg as well, you know, then you start thinking about, well, where do we want to have our agents?
00:34:13
Speaker
You know, is it Manila? Is it wherever? You know, you can pick wherever you want to put them. Doesn't mean you don't...
00:34:20
Speaker
have native speaking linguists in certain regions, of course you can, you can still do that. You can still have agents in certain markets where you see that the revenue is so big that you want to provide local agents in those, of course you can, but now you can think about a dual approach where you can do both, you can send it automatically if you want to or whatever it might be, but you can think about where you want to do it. You're not going to silo into doing something a certain way simply because you don't have the resources at hand.
00:34:47
Speaker
So yeah, it was a real good idea. It made common sense for everyone. And the amount of savings that we made were massive for some customers. But I think really the shift in actually being able to scale customer support globally was the big thing. It's a really, really massive thing when you think about it.
00:35:07
Speaker
There's a few notes I took while you were talking through there, and I'd love to kind of just rerun it back here. And first of all, beautiful sales pitch for help shift. One of my finer ones there, so thank you for that. Hopefully now I'm going to wave my hands like this, but hopefully we can show you an overlay of what
00:35:25
Speaker
what language AI looks like in the Helpshift dashboard. You can see, and hopefully my video editors find a way to edit this so it's not just me doing this, but we can see it. So if you're following our YouTube, you'll see this. But a few things you said there that were very interesting. One is you basically talked about staffing. You have the ability to staff for global support without needing
00:35:43
Speaker
someone all over the globe. You can provide 24-hour customer service at a lower cost because of the ability to have everyone speak whatever language the tool is set to. I think that's fascinating. You talked about retention, and retention is an interesting one. We often hear quite a bit that one of the highest countries for revenue for players is Japan. If you're not speaking Japanese, the Japanese market is not going to give you
00:36:07
Speaker
time of day. So being able to translate your text as well as your agents. I mean, people don't think about supporters being a part of the game, but we recently heard a story which was interesting about a German game where all the users were coming to support and talking in English, even though they were German users. And what they heard from their customers after a few interviews were that
00:36:27
Speaker
It, the whole experience of the game was actually an English game. It was kind of like a mythological thing. And players wanted to continue that lore and customer support. So they were just continuing speaking in English and they confused them on why, but it's interesting that support is part of the experience and you want to make sure that they feel like it's part of that experience. And from a monetary value, I mean, again, from a savings from a cost perspective of being able to choose where your agents are located. How often are they working? What hours are they working? Again, I said monetary value. And I already talked about my Japan example.
00:36:57
Speaker
There seems to be a lot of benefit for having these stuff in help shift or in the support tool so that the agent can do this real time translation. And that was a lot, but I think a lot of this made sense that I seem to sum that up properly. Yeah, no, that makes sense to me too. And I hope the listeners, you know, if they want to see it or hear it, you know, reach out to you about it. But I would, every time they build a game, I would just say, please just think about your customer. Just think about the player.
00:37:27
Speaker
Think about the experience they have and ask yourself every single time, what would you want? And what would you expect? And whatever you expect in the language that you speak, that's what you should deliver. That's the fundamental thing you should always do when you build a game. Have you heard feedback from the users on HelpShift who are using the tool and kind of their experience with it so far?
00:37:53
Speaker
yeah yeah you know um security has been quite you know
00:37:58
Speaker
from the actual client point of view. Because when you're going in and out of different technology, you've got to come pay stuff and you've got to get agents to do it. You're putting it in maybe whatever kind of tool you might be using, and therefore that might not be secure. And you might be taking data out of places, and that's not really what's happening now. You need to make sure that you have your data and your client data and your client communication and your lockdown. And so they were really happy that the process was secure.
00:38:26
Speaker
and that there was no potential leaks for data out of the player engagement or the customer support functions now in businesses and also you know like that that whole like relief of okay well we don't need to worry about the game being localised now.
00:38:44
Speaker
into Russian or into Spanish or into whatever language, right, that you might want to be able to do because you can provide support no matter what. So it means that the player engagement part of the process now can react. And it's not the thing that reacts at the end. It's a thing that just says, well, okay, we're launching in the new market. Great. What's the expected uptake?
00:39:10
Speaker
to be and we can make sure we have the agency in place to do it and that's as simple as that and you can imagine that the stress is removed because player engagement itself is stressful you know like you have a lot of people invest a lot of money in their games as well you know they have to they have to feel they have to feel like they're being looked after and have to feel like they have that care you know and the agents have to deal with a lot of stress too so they have to be professional
00:39:36
Speaker
You know, they can't just be someone you get in and pull out and leave and you have to be able to deal with, you know, sometimes young children.
00:39:44
Speaker
who have invested money or maybe even high swing players, the VIP players who've got like 50, 60 grand invested in the game, those kind of players expect a certain level of experience. So the feedback we'll be getting is that AI is working really, really well, don't have any challenges with it, love the fact that it's opened up this way of thinking, but it hasn't changed the fact that they can still go back to doing
00:40:10
Speaker
you know, human customer support where they need to as well. So, you know, we're hearing really good feedback. We're trying to also, they're also asking us where else can we use AI now? So, because it works here, they say, okay, well, can we now use this in our game? We say, yeah, okay, you can. And we're kind of doing it anyway. So,
00:40:28
Speaker
Here is where we can use machine translation or AI here because you can leverage an engine, for example, you might have started to create for player support, and then you can maybe use that baseline engine to build something on top of it to build on one for a game. You can do that as well. There is ways to take what you've learned from the engaged experience and use it in other areas too. It's what's operationalizing your technology that we have at Play.
00:40:58
Speaker
I think my one main takeaway I took from that, the most priority one to me was that it's all two
Balancing Technology and Human Interaction
00:41:05
Speaker
things. It's all secure built into the platform. You're no longer copying and pasting and putting it into a chat GPT or a Google. This is customer data. It's sensitive data. Why are you going to throw it onto third party tools? It may not seem like it's risky, but there is an inherent risk when you're copying data out of a platform into another tool that's public based.
00:41:23
Speaker
The second one is that it's still human based, right? Yeah, we call it AI and it's machine learning. And there might be me translating English text into Russian because I don't know it. But it's still me as an agent. You're not working with a machine. You're not working with a robot on the other end. So you're still getting that human support despite maybe me not knowing that language. And I think at the end of the day, there's a comfort knowing I'm still working with someone, even though they may not know my language. And I think that's an important perspective for players that need to know that.
00:41:54
Speaker
I think those are most of my questions. I have some couple of normal podcast questions, which for people that don't listen to the podcast, I normally send a list of questions that we may talk about. Dominic, I'm just putting on the spot here because he's a friend. Okay. First one's easy one. What do you have for breakfast?
00:42:11
Speaker
Oh, what did I have for breakfast? That was just a cup of coffee and a banana, to be honest with you. There you go. Yeah, very, very sensible, very sensible. Not the full Irish that I would like to have, but the wife has me on a bit of a diet. So, you know, I have to look after myself. I turned 41 last week, so. Congratulations. Now I need to. That's banana coffee. Make sure everything runs properly. Keep on my under cholesterol and stuff like that. So, yeah. Cool.
00:42:40
Speaker
What did you want to be when you were growing up? I'm sure you didn't dream of being a machine language, machine learning translation tool creator. I want to be a games programmer.
00:42:51
Speaker
I'm a qualified software engineer. I did computer gaming, commercial programming, you know, in university. I created my own little physics engine, which worked 78, 85% of the time. And I thought I was great at it. And I tried to get a job in Cork and different places with different kind of gaming companies and did a bit of work there. But I ended up
00:43:15
Speaker
working for a translation management technology company, writing passes for things like frame maker and file formats, basically. So get content out of it and put it back in after it's translated. And that was a long time ago. About 40 years now. So you wanted to create games. What game was the first game you remember playing or kind of turned you on to gaming?
Dominic's Gaming Journey
00:43:41
Speaker
Commodore 64, Kung Fu.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, you don't even know what that is. You're too young. I know the Commodore 64, the game itself, I am not familiar with the game. Go on to the Commodore 64. There's an emulator, right? Kung Fu. It is the best and worst game ever. Because don't forget, this is back in the day where literally the game graphics weren't great and you totally relied on just smashing buttons and doing stuff like that, really. And that was like one of my favorite, favorite ever games that I ever played.
00:44:14
Speaker
And then, you know, of course, then, you know, everyone knows that when you start playing games properly, you end up with your Super Nintendo and your Mega Drive and what have you. So, yeah, but that was my first one. Commodore 64 Kung Fu was the best. Sweet. That's a great answer. I love it. I often hear that a lot of people in the industry don't really enjoy gaming much anymore. Are you still a gamer? And if so, what game are you playing now?
00:44:43
Speaker
I've got some games that are trusted favourites that I go back to. Which I just shout out to my 2K people. Civilization. I still play Civ IV. I go back to it. I don't know why. The clicking, the clicking, the clicking.
00:45:05
Speaker
It's addictive, but I've always liked that, so I play Civ 4, Civ 5 and Civ 6 and stuff like that, so I play those games. Always go back to Civ 4, that'll work, just do. Starfield, they've been playing that as well, that's been quite cool, you know, love that game.
00:45:24
Speaker
For like 76 I was playing before but now Starfield has kind of taken over my life a little bit with it. Always go back to other kind of standard games as well, like Football Manager and things like that, with my son that we play all the time because we always like to think we're smart with each other when it comes to picking players.
00:45:42
Speaker
and FIFA and stuff like that. But yeah, the main one probably is Starfield at the minute and that's taken up my life. But there are a few others on my hit list that people are telling me I should take a look at. But yeah, the Starfield one is really the one at the minute.
00:45:58
Speaker
Here's a fun story about me. When I was in college, I went to college in Baltimore, Maryland. And there was a project where I had to go meet a creator of some sorts that inspired me. And I realized that Firaxis was also located near Baltimore, Maryland. And Firaxis makes the Civilization game. So I reached out to them.
00:46:16
Speaker
and I'm gonna get his name wrong and I apologize but I went there and I got to meet Sid Mir and he walked me around the studio and he opened up this closet full of games and said hey you can take a game or two if you want I was just like oh my god that was like my dream moment I got to meet a video game creator that is the prime of his game when making some of the best games of civilization that were ever invented and it was just this starstruck moment for me that really solidified that this is something I want to do for a living and it was just such a great experience
00:46:44
Speaker
I am very jealous. I'm very jealous. I would have loved to have done that myself. It's great when you get to see the people that are actually involved in the game and the creators of the game and stuff like that. That would be very jealous. What game did you pick by the way? It was called Pirates.
00:47:09
Speaker
It's, uh, you got to sail around the ship. It was similar to civilization. I was never really great at turn-based strategy. I was more of a command and conquer type of player in real time, but I respect the game to this day. Gandhi still crushes me whenever I decide to try and play the game and it's just, it is what it is. Yeah. Yuri's Avengers is always the command and conquer one. Great game. One of my first online games, an Unreal tournament. I just remember playing that game online. Just amazing.
00:47:39
Speaker
Dominic, I'm so glad we got to do this. I'm glad we got to talk about the technology. I really think it's cool stuff. I'm glad we got to hear your story about it. I'm glad to hear that you're fixing your diet with coffee and bananas. But I think it's great stuff. I think we're going to have a lot of information about Language AI on our player-engaged website, on our keywords website, on our help website. We'll be able to share this. And I appreciate your time. Is there anything else you'd like to just share or plug while you got the time here?
00:48:07
Speaker
Well I suppose everyone's going to, if you are going to the Japanese game show or you've been at the Canadian game shows recently, always reach out and say hello, ask if one of us is there, it's always good to say hello.
00:48:22
Speaker
I love to meet new people and discover new technologies, stuff like that. So if I'm ever in an event, feel free, do not feel afraid to come up and say, hi, have you seen this? Because that's the stuff I love. So sharing and getting to know new technologies is always a great thing for me. So that's one thing I would say. Don't be ever afraid to come up and say hello and share something with me because that's basically why I live my life.
00:48:45
Speaker
Great. Appreciate that, Dominic. And unfortunately we had another potential guest joining us that knew how to sing Frank Sinatra. Fortunately, he's not here and Dominic cannot sing Frank Sinatra. So we're going to, we're going to cut that from the clip here, but, uh, I appreciate everything. I hope we can do this again and talk more about it. I hope everyone that's listening has a great day and I look forward to talking to you guys again. See you. Bye.