I’m not a DeepL employee, and they didn’t pay me to write this: neither I’m a paying customer of their service. I use just the free version. But I think that among other SaaS that use AI it’s one of the best I’ve ever made use of, and it will still be in the next years. If you’re wondering, I use to double check my English with it.
I’m Italian, and like most of Italians I have difficulty speaking foreign languages: I studied French in elementary school, English since middle school, and Spanish at university, but I can only speak English reasonably well. My partner speaks seven languages. She’s Romanian, indeed.
Over the years I understood that Google Translate is crap. Or, at least, it was: now they say they fixed it, but I don’t think I’ll come back using it. I only trust DeepL, and I don’t even know how it works under the hood. I trust it because my partner does, and she knows what she’s talking about.
Here’s the point. I can use AI to help me coding, because I do know how to code, even without it: and I do understand when it’s wrong. Vibe coders don’t. But I wrote my first lines of code back in 1989, at the age of four, when my partner was naturally bilingual already. If she trusts it, I trust it.
I agree with Sam Altman, because I’m working for a corporate that uses AI on a daily basis: artificial intelligence is definitely a bubble. Our services now cost ten times more with the same features as before. Sometimes, even a hundred times more. But salespeople sell them as if they cost a thousand times less.
Yes, because salespeople do not consider the costs of services. They think in terms of salaries saved, but they don’t think about how much more it costs to provide the same service. And customers don’t want to pay more for the same result. Who would? I certainly wouldn’t.
You can fire an employee, but you can’t replace them with AI: if you really can do that, then you never needed them in the first place. In all other cases, you are making a big mistake, and your company could go bankrupt. Because you’re going to spend too much.
That said, and I don’t know anything about its business model, but it doesn’t really matter here, some services go beyond the bubble—and will survive it. I think DeepL is one of them: established in 2017, before the GPT era, it’s still growing and has became a benchmark for the industry.
DeepL Translator is just one of the provided services, and I think it’s enough to experience it: I’ve never registered an account, but I will, since its API guarantees 500.000 characters free of charge monthly, and I do want to try them. You can use the service without any registration from its public interface as well.
APIs do require an account, since you must get a key to authenticate, but the free tier is generous. LLMs helped adding more features, such as the tone, but it worked very well with its original Neural Machine Translator (NMT) algorithm. Speaking about the services I can no longer do without, DeepL is in first place.
What about you? Which AI-based service really changed your life? I mean, something unrelated to programming. Maybe, a decision-making assistant… or a weather service. Or, again, a note-taking software: I used to be an Evernote lover, and I bought an interactive Moleskine years ago.
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