The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.

Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.

It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.

But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.

Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL's first Series A - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark

Benchmark is very AI-pilled: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...

it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...

Yeah I was doing that at the beginning of this year with voice samples locally from hollywood-stars with Qwen3-TTS.

It took like 1min - capture something from a youtube or video and put in your own text. It worked also really good for a german test.

Made a voice message for my wife from one of our favorite actors, telling here how nice it would be to make some breakfast :D

Did you make her breakfast?

He cooked eggs for the handsome actor.

As an engineer i would never think that complicated - morse code?

Couldn't it be just binary

long-long-short-short-short

11000

Which is - to everyones surprise - 24 as in hours.

To anyone other than a computer engineer, I would bet Morse code would be preferred at least 10 to 1. Most people who aren’t computer science majors could barely decode binary “10” correctly, whereas writing down the dots and dashes and googling “Morse code chart” is something I’d bet over 50% of non-engineers could do accurately.

How is this any different than decoding binary? If you can read a chart of codes involving either dot or dash surely you can also read a chart of codes with either 0 or 1.

It's not so much that it's different, it's just that Morse is the canonical dot-dash/beep-boop communication format in the UK, and binary is a niche distant second known only in the abstract as "it's all ones and zeros" to most non-tech people. So while an engineer would expect a beep-boop to be binary, a police station caretaker would expect it to be Morse, and I'd expect the people building that system to build it for the caretaker.

I had that thought too when I saw the parent comment earlier, but then I looked up the Morse code digits and I have to admit that they are much easier to decode from a flashing light than binary and I'm pretty good doing binary in my head:

    ----- 0000
    .---- 0001
    ..--- 0010
    ...-- 0011
    ....- 0100
    ..... 0101
    -.... 0110
    --... 0111
    ---.. 1000
    ----. 1001

Also, if I see a light with short and long blinks and a pause in between, I'm going to immediately think Morse, not binary, and decoding it is almost intuitive.