BOUNTIFUL—Language is often a barrier when it comes to communication in everyday life and in business. A Bountiful company has developed a tool that takes a conversation between two people who speak different languages and translates it back to each individual in their native tongue. 

OneMeta is an AI-powered multilingual communication platform with 125 different languages and dialects. 

“There’s a lot of companies that are doing something like what we do,” said CEO & Founder Saúl Leal. “Apple has it on their phones but I put this technology on the carrier level like Verizon and AT&T. I can pick up the phone right now and make a call, no app, no internet and dial a number and talk to you in Spanish. You can hear me in German, Italian or English, it’s voice to voice.”

It’s all about the accessibility to it, he said. “By putting this on the phone system, by making this very accessible on Microsoft Teams, we’re in conversation with other very, very large organizations.”

This is where technology becomes a beautiful aspect of the extension of humanity, said Leal. “Where not only the world becomes flat, the world becomes accessible. That’s the key.”

Relationships are now becoming a commodity with LinkedIn, he said. “But there’s a challenge. You can’t really connect with someone in Saudi Arabia. Just last week I reached out to a gentleman in South Africa. I was able to reach out and connect with an individual in Saudi Arabia, in Dubai. I was able to speak Spanish and Arabic.”

That’s the magic of this technology, Leal said. “I had a lawyer who worked with another lawyer from Mexico. I gave them this technology and the lawyer from the United States told me ‘Saul, for the first time, I not only understood my colleague in Mexico, but I realized that he is one of the best lawyers I have ever known in my entire career, because I was able to understand what he was trying to say and not through a filter of knowledge of another language.’”

Leal is originally from Venezuela and has been in the U.S. for about 25 years. “I did an MBA at BYU and then studied at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. I’m an engineer, telecommunications and systems engineer, so more on the software side.”

He started the company about three and a half years ago. “There’s no shortcut to excellence,” he said. “Everything takes a lot of work so we have built data sets and there’s something that is called organic training and synthetic training so we build both. We take a few hundred hours of organic recording and make it into thousands of hours in synthetic coding.”

Leal said they started building and teaching the data sets. “From these data sets we go to the models and we enhance the models. (For example) if we take Czech from the Czech Republic to English those models are like 40%-50% accurate. One out of two words are wrong. Then we use our data sets and we’ll take it to 90% accuracy.”

Of course, there’s a lot that goes into the architecture, he said. “It’s both the user experience and the integration of our technology with traditional legacy systems like call centers for instance. That’s why we're having so much success.”

So this is the power of using technology, said Leal. “You just pick up the phone and talk to someone. We’re implementing these in call centers all over the world. The user experience is different. It’s augmenting not only the human, but really augmenting human relationships.”