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FOBIE.ai

Deal with customers who don't speak my language

An enquiry arrives in Polish, or your best supplier's English runs out at the technical bit. This job is about getting through the conversation.

What a good result looks like

Use this to judge a demo. A tool that cannot do these is not doing the job, whatever it is called.

  • It handles the direction you actually need, well, rather than a hundred languages badly.
  • It keeps names, part numbers and measurements untouched.
  • It works where the conversation happens — your email, your phone, your chat.
  • It flags where a translation is uncertain.

What usually goes wrong

The things people find out after they have paid.

  • Machine translation of anything contractual is a risk you are taking on yourself.
  • Tone travels badly. Direct in one language reads as rude in another.
  • Quality varies enormously by language pair. Test yours specifically.

3 tools that do this

How this list is ordered — and why money is not one of the reasons
  1. 1. How squarely the tool does this job. A tool built for this job comes before one that can be made to do it. A tool that needs wiring up comes last.
  2. 2. How much we actually know about it. A tool we have used ourselves comes before one we have only researched, which comes before one only a reader has written in about, which comes before one nobody has assessed. A tool low on this list is not bad. It is unknown.
  3. 3. How technical you need to be. Where the first two signals tie, the one a non-technical person can set up alone comes first. This site is for people who are not going to write code.
  4. 4. How recently we checked the listing. A listing we checked last month is worth more to you than one we checked last year, so it breaks the remaining ties. Listings we have never checked come last.

Nothing commercial appears on that list, and nothing commercial is given to the code that orders it. How we make money, and how you can check.

  1. DeepL

    by DeepL

    The specialist. Noticeably better on European language pairs than general assistants.

    Built for thisListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  2. ChatGPT

    by OpenAI

    Strong across common language pairs, and better than most at keeping tone.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

  3. Gemini

    by Google

    Backed by Google's translation, which is strong on unusual language pairs.

    Does this wellListed, not reviewedNo setup help neededFree tier to try it

Reviews against this job

Listed, not reviewedIt is in the directory. Nobody here has assessed it yet.

Nobody here has assessed any of these tools against this job yet. The listings above describe what each one is sold to do and how squarely it fits — which is real information — but none of it is a verdict, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Used one of these for this job? Tell us what happened — reader reports are published as reader reports, in your words, clearly labelled.

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