The California-based company recently provided an update on its live artificial intelligence translation services as the technology was helping emergency management officials in Los Angeles County reach residents via multi-language translations of daily press conferences.
The update provides ideas of where a growing part of public-sector AI is headed in 2025.
Wordly, less than a decade old, is hardly the only AI provider in government technology, but it’s making plays to increase its profile via contracts with such cities as North Las Vegas, Nev.; San Jose, Calif.; and Plainfield, N.J.
An example of a typical use of Wordly tech comes from Modesto, Calif.
That city, located in the Central Valley, signed up with Wordly in 2022 and uses its tools for translations of City Council meetings — a potentially vital effort in a city where some 40 percent of the population speaks Spanish, a Wordly spokesperson tells Government Technology via email.
Those residents can access real-time translations of government business via their personal devices.
Spanish stands as the most popular language for Wordly translations, as is the case for other public-sector translation services, reflecting the fact that Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in the U.S., with more than 41 million speakers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Even as the prospects of an immigration crackdown and deportations loom with the incoming presidential administration, the number of non-native English speakers in the country remains sizable and looks likely to keep growing. At least 68 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, the Census Bureau says.
That means a strong demand for such common languages as Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic and French. Wordly has also recently added such languages as Armenian, Catalan, Georgian, Icelandic, Ukrainian, Afrikaans, Albanian, Norwegian and Punjabi.
The company also has added such services as real-time recognition of speaker languages; push-to-talk translation, which allows people who speak different languages to take part in the same meeting; improved custom glossaries that can better handle jargon and specialized terms; and video-on-demand API, which enables local agencies to add subtitles to videos.
In the coming year, as use of AI for civic translation tasks continues to grow, customers will demand ever higher quality for the technology, according to Dave Deasy, the company’s chief marketing officer. AI quality involves speed, accuracy, ease of use and affordability, he told Government Technology via email.
“We have developed several proprietary technical capabilities enabling our solution to work for a wide range of room configurations and with a wide range of A/V systems,” he said.
More than 100 public agencies use Wordly for AI translation, Deasy said. That includes cities, counties and law enforcement.
“I expect this to double in the next six months since we are seeing demand across the U.S. from agencies of all sizes,” he said.
Clients primarily use Wordly for city council and other community meetings, with employee training standing as the “next biggest use case,” he said, adding that permits and bill payments via kiosks and service desks are “emerging” use cases for the tech.
