Pocketalk is a company located in Minato-ku, Tokyo that plans, develops, manufactures, licenses, and sells AI interpretation devices and software related to interpretation and translation. As its name suggests, the company is famous for Pocketalk (its AI interpretation device), which was developed using advanced natural language technology. Pocketalk strives to achieve the mission of eliminating language barriers.

Pocketalk is an AI interpretation device that allows people that do not speak the same language to communicate using their native languages. Pocketalk can translate 70 languages into speech and text (and 13 languages into text only). The product works based on the latest optimized engine in the cloud and AI, providing high translation accuracy. It can translate long sentences without any issues.

In addition, Pocketalk has a built-in mobile communication module that works in more than 130 countries and regions worldwide. (Pocketalk S works in 141 countries and regions, and Pocketalk W works in 139 countries and regions.) Pocketalk also functions in places without Wi-Fi available, so it works right out of the box.

Cumulative shipments of the Pocketalk series have surpassed 960,000 units since its launch in December 2017. The cumulative number of translations has exceeded 180 million. Pocketalk Subtitles was launched in 2021 to meet the demands of remote conferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was followed by the launch of the Pocketalk app in 2022, and the progress shows no signs of stopping.

Recently, Pocketalk has donated devices to refugees from Ukraine, making a significant contribution to their lives in Japan.

Pocketalk has been rolling out a series of products globally, including the beginning sale of Pocketalk S in China on March 29, 2021. Pocketalk is using several Alibaba Cloud services as the system infrastructure for its services, including Pocketalk S. Pocketalk highly appreciates Elastic IP Address - China BGP Pro (EIP BGP Pro) and Elastic Compute Service (ECS).

Pocketalk has been developing its services globally, aiming to eliminate language barriers. Pocketalk planned to expand services in China, but communication speed was a major obstacle.

Pocketalk requires an Internet connection with the server when translating, but communication within Mainland China requires a VPN, which inevitably results in slow response times.

"We need Internet access to use Pocketalk, but we had to use a VPN to communicate with Mainland China, so we had to expect a drop in service level," says Egawa. Alibaba Cloud provided a service to solve this problem.

EIP BGP Pro was the key to overcoming Pocketalk's challenges.

After using EIP BGP Pro in the China (Hong Kong) region installed by Alibaba Cloud, Pocketalk succeeded in launching services in China while maintaining communication quality.

"The adoption of EIP BGP Pro into our system infrastructure was very helpful, as we were able to maintain the same communication quality during the connection test as we had in Japan. Also, we came to know that by using the China (Hong Kong) region, we could connect to China without using a VPN, which was highly beneficial," says Egawa.

Pocketalk also highly appreciates the service level of ECS.

"While cloud services provided by other companies required us to stop the services during maintenance, we were surprised to learn that Alibaba Cloud's server instances do not need to be stopped during maintenance," says Egawa.

Let's take a look at the Alibaba Cloud services Pocketalk uses:

In addition to EIP BGP Pro and ECS, Pocketalk uses Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Server Load Balancer (SLB), and NAT Gateway:

EIP BGP Pro
EIP is an independent public IP address service that decouples public IP addresses from ECS instances for easier management. An EIP is a NAT IP address located in the Internet gateway of Alibaba Cloud and mapped to the associated cloud resource through NAT. After a cloud resource is associated with an EIP, the cloud resource can communicate with the Internet through the EIP. With the China BGP Pro plan, network latency for users in Mainland China is reduced for web services deployed in the China (Hong Kong) region.

ECS
ECS provides a flexible and secure virtual server environment for all your cloud hosting needs. Deploy ECS instances with a few clicks from the web console and scale capacity up or down based on real-time demands.

VPC
Alibaba Cloud VPC helps you build an isolated network on the cloud to manage resources in a secure environment with restricted external access. When you deploy a VPC, you can customize the IP address range and configure the route table and network gateway to control your network.

In addition, you can connect on-premises networks to the VPC to increase resources and leverage Alibaba Cloud as an extension of your data center.

SLB
SLB is a high-performance load balancing service that is available in two types: Classic Load Balancer (CLB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB). CLB runs at Layer 4 and supports up to 100,000 queries per second (QPS). ALB runs at Layer 7 and supports up to 1,000,000 QPS based on Alibaba Cloud Apsara Network 2.0. ALB has been used especially for this project.

VPN Gateway
VPN Gateway is a service that connects data centers and remote clients to Alibaba Cloud VPCs using Internet VPNs. It supports Internet Protocol security (IPsec) and SSL VPN connections and provides services in accordance with local laws and regulations regarding VPNs.

Pocketalk released a survey on translation and interpretation costs for companies on October 12, 2022. According to the survey, Japanese companies spend an average of 4.628 million yen per year on translation and interpretation, with some companies spending up to 50 million yen annually.

More than 70% of businesspersons said language barriers were a hindrance to their work, and 50% of executives considered unproductive foreign-language communication as a business loss.

Furthermore, less than 20% of all companies are making efforts to hire more foreign workers, and language barriers were the No. 1 reason (accounting for over 70%) for companies not doing so.

Similar situations are expected to occur in countries outside of Japan, and it is expected that there will be even greater demand for services provided by Pocketalk.

Since expanding the Pocketalk service to China is a part of its service expansion plan, the company is interested in Machine Translation, Alibaba Cloud's superior cloud-based translation service that even covers regional Chinese dialects.

Alibaba Cloud will continue to support and work with Pocketalk.