Only 8% of South Africans speak English at home, yet in 2025 it is still the primary language of communication for South African brands. Local customer experience company, Helm has a unique approach to AI that allows it to automate customer communication in any of South Africa’s 11 official spoken languages
Having built an AI engine eight years ago with a focus on under-resourced languages, Helm identified multilingualism as a key component in the customer experience journey and incorporated natural language understanding (NLU) into the Helm Engine . This gives it the ability to not only understand the intent behind what users are saying, but respond in any language.
The head of marketing, Stef Adonis, believes that more companies should be using this technology to incorporate language diversity into their brand strategies. “South African companies place a lot of emphasis on customer experience,” he says. “But sadly, loyalty cards and delivery dashes are often prioritised over language preferences. If you are not an English speaker, even something as simple as a store locator can be a challenge to use. Now imagine you’re doing something more complicated like taking out a loan or signing a legal document. It’s just not fair to expect second-, third- or even fourth-language English speakers to transact in that way. We believe that all South African consumers should have the right to interact with technology in their home language. We have made the tech available on our platform Helm Engine, and we can’t wait for more South African companies to join us on our journey to fully multilingual customer experiences.”
Helm believes that merely translating content into different languages is not enough. Dynamic translation may convert words from one language to another, but it often fails to grasp the nuances and intent behind the conversation. This is where natural language understanding (NLU) steps in.
Helm Engine harnesses the potential of NLU to facilitate meaningful interactions. With the ability to understand user intent, it ensures that communication goes beyond simple translation and interprets the context behind customer inquiries, allowing brands to respond appropriately and enhance the overall user experience. In some cases where there is no good way to translate technical jargon language experts are brought in to enhance the machine translations, keeping the human in the loop.
The appetite for multilingual communication is growing, and Helm is at the forefront of this movement. Its platform supports all 11 official spoken languages of South Africa, as well as any other language, enabling brands to create intelligent assistants that resonate with wider audiences. Its multichannel and multimodal capabilities also allow for text, voice and visual interactions on any platform – most popularly WhatsApp – ensuring that companies can meet their customers where they are, in the language they understand best.
Imagine a South Africa where companies can automate everyday tasks, improve efficiencies and handle billions of messages seamlessly in any language. This is the future that Helm is working towards.
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