I went to the website to see how bad it was and it has a headline that claims it's so good "no one will suspect AI" which seems to be casting shade on their own product.
Of course there was no open public facing developer documentation so I engaged with the chatbot to ask about what code for implementation actually looked like and it said it's a <script> tag.
It waxed about how it was instant translation and works with dynamic content.
I said I didn't believe it was instant and asked how many milliseconds it really takes and how it handles dynamic content (e.g. elements frequently updated with React/Angular/Vue/etc).
It admitted it's not really instant and takes several seconds and that you can define CSS style selectors to tell it what to look for.
There is no way the UX could be good for a product designed to work this way. :/
@acdha Yeah, it does seem like they have a control panel you can use to configure things, which is good.
I admire the attempt to reduce the complexity by trying to simplify it down to a script tag, but in practice I don't see that being enough for a good user experience, especially with dynamic content, even if it's as sophisticated as is technically possible.
@iaincollins I was thinking is that it also shifts the burden of translation review to more likely be responding to user complaints whereas in a normal flow you'd at least have a chance to say we're doing something new before publishing it.
To your UX point, I'd be shocked if this didn't often have multi-second delays, especially internationally, which would be invisible to the site owner since they're always cached. I've tracked that for years and almost nobody's TTFB is as good as they think.
Iain Collins
Chris Adams