The XTM webinar on XTM Cloud 13.3 was a great opportunity for everyone interested in the future of the company to gain valuable insights and discover how we are shaping the future of the industry while successfully moving to an Agile release cycle, with new releases coming every four to six weeks.

Here’s a summary of the key takeaways from the event, highlighting our vision, the innovative initiatives we’re taking to make that vision a reality, and how this will impact the localization industry.

Our transition to Agile methodology represents a significant paradigm shift in our development process. Ian Evans, CEO of XTM, described this transformation as a crucial step in achieving our future vision. He highlighted the importance of being responsive to customer needs and delivering impactful enhancements efficiently.

By adopting Agile, we aim to streamline our release process, improve reliability, and decrease defects and bugs in new releases. The net impact of this will be faster upgrades and greater responsiveness to customer requests. This agile approach positions us as a more innovative and adaptive enterprise solution, ensuring we deliver a stable and cutting-edge platform that meets the evolving needs of our clients.

Ian confirmed to the audience that 13.3 was released on July 2, and 13.4, our first Agile release, will follow soon after in August. 

Sara Basile, our Product Director, emphasized the significance of streamlining user experiences for project managers and linguists. She explained, “We wanted to make sure that we streamline your user experience, get you up to speed on new features, and ensure that you can work efficiently in XTM Cloud every day.“

We have invested in modernizing our user interface, adhering to web content accessibility guidelines to provide a more inclusive experience. With advanced search enhancements and improvements in query management, project managers can work more efficiently and access critical information quickly. We aim to empower users by reducing manual work and enhancing control and visibility over projects, ultimately delivering a seamless and satisfying user experience.

The introduction of our multi-stemmer feature, which is unique in the localization industry, enhances accuracy in recognizing terminology, especially in highly inflected languages. Additionally, we now support Google automatic glossaries, allowing users to leverage custom terminology while machine translating content. These improvements ensure consistent and high-quality translations, protecting brand reputation and style.

As part of the XTM team, our approach to AI-driven quality assurance is marked by responsibility and efficiency. We focus on leveraging AI to improve the logistical aspects of human translation. This includes streamlining workflow improvements, speeding up quality assessments, and scoring based on AI insights. Evans underscored the importance of responsible AI, stating, “We wanted to look at the improvements and business benefits that we would create through AI. We also wanted to address concerns about data privacy and security.“

With AI-powered checks for non-inclusive or inappropriate language and translation quality evaluation scores, we empower users to ensure content accuracy while respecting ethical and inclusive considerations. The responsible integration of AI safeguards the integrity and quality of translations, making us a trusted partner for customers seeking efficient and reliable translation management.

The launch event was also an opportunity to showcase real-world customer results from our AI-enhanced TM functionality. Melissa Favre-Lorraine, Product Marketing Specialist at XTM, presented results from Ariel Corporation, stating:

We had a large audience of XTM Cloud users and interested parties live, and since the event was a great opportunity for the audience to ask questions and share their thoughts on the future of XTM Cloud, Dave Ruane asked the audience which features they were most interested in from the 13.3 release. As shown below, a majority of attendees (64.1%) said they were most interested in AI-powered quality checks, followed by new features relating to Terminology, Neural Machine Translation, and Filter Templates (58.97%). 

The webinar was also a great opportunity for attendees to not only answer polls, but also ask questions. One of the questions raised was, “What is XTM doing to ensure that their product releases that are being proposed within an agile flow are as ‘bug/defect free’ as possible when they are released?” In response, Ian explained that the team recently underwent a comprehensive test cycle, focusing on building up a higher level of automation. As a result, our test group automation went from 8-20% to an impressive 60-70% range. This significant investment in stabilization and bug fixing led to a 16% decline in tickets since the release of XTM Cloud 13.3.

Another question was, “How do you plan to address the privacy concerns connected with the usage of LLM?” Ian acknowledged that privacy is indeed a major area of focus for XTM. When he joined the company, the team was already looking at enabling LLMs through our platform. They decided to work with customers in their private LMM rather than just enabling public LMM, as that felt like the right thing to do, especially as the world becomes more concerned about the quality of data privacy and data transfers. This is a big area for XTM, and we are working through each and every case with our customers.

In the future, the AI-powered quality checks, currently available to a group of beta users, will become available to everyone. This will have a positive impact on everyone involved in the localization process: linguists will be able to create high-quality, inclusive content quickly and easily without having to reference offline guides, project managers will see faster turnaround times as projects are completed faster, and enterprises will be able to enter new markets faster, while being confident that the content they use worldwide will be well received in their target markets.

Version 13.3 was released in July, and with version 13.4, scheduled for August, we will focus on product stabilization. Following that, users can expect the introduction of new AI features, faster releases, updates to the user interface, and various exciting enhancements designed to benefit linguists and project managers. Stay tuned as we continue to shape the future of the localization industry.