Jumping to Europe, the London-based AI voice startup Palabra launched a new “streaming-native” text-to-speech (TTS) engine, then welcomed Andrey Feldman as their new CTO.
Speaking to Slator, Feldman described his outlook on Palabra as “ambitious” stating that they “are building […] a platform that can serve multiple real-world scenarios, with the tools and documentation needed for seamless integration across use cases, including live streaming, events, or call translation.”
With so much movement in the voice AI space, we were curious about our readers’ experience with AI voices, asking them how long they had actually spoken to an AI voice agent over the phone.
More than half of respondents (55.2%) said they’d never talked to an AI voice agent for more than 20 seconds, while about a third (31.6%) said they’d done it a few times. Almost one in ten (7.9%) said they weren’t sure because it’s getting hard to tell when you’re talking to an AI these days, and the smallest cohort (5.3%) said they’d talked to an AI voice agent for longer.
Slator Gets a New Look
In early April 2026 Slator launched a new website, including major updates to the navigation, branding, and logo.
The new site has been reorganized in order to make it easier for those in the language solutions and AI community to access all of the company’s distinct service areas including research and insights publications, as well as advisory, consulting, and events.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the update, Slator’s Managing Director Florian Faes said, “this new site reflects who we are today. It reflects how we support our clients, readers, subscribers, and conference participants with market insights that inform their most important revenue and strategy decisions.”
While the team has been squashing any last bugs in the new site, we asked whether Slator readers thought their own websites may be in need of a facelift.
Nearly four out of ten (39.3%) love their company’s website, about a third (32.1%) think “it’s okay,” and a little more than a quarter (28.6%) aren’t really impressed. Good news for the companies employing Slator readers, nobody responded “Hate it.”
X Adopts Translation-as-a-Feature
On April 6, 2026 the Head of Product at X (formerly Twitter), Nikita Bier, announced that the platform now supports globally available automated post translations powered by Grok, the company’s in-house AI model.
The announcement was met with mixed responses as some X users commented immediately asking how to turn the feature off, or customize which languages the feature should autotranslate, and some expressed quality concerns in specific languages.
At the same time, most commenters on the announcement responded positively, calling the new autotranslation feature a “great idea,” hyping the potential for improved international reach, and a few praising the translation quality.
Time will tell whether the X autotranslate feature becomes the game changer some commenters are already saying it is. Cutting through the hype, Slator readers were asked what they thought of this feature release, and for the most part they weren’t impressed.
A whopping two thirds of respondents (67.4%) are indifferent, saying they don’t use X at all. A smaller cohort (14%) equivocated saying “sure why not.” Only about one in ten (11.6%) actually thought it was a great new feature, and the smallest group (7%) said they had turned the feature off.
Not the Only Rebrand
On April 13, 2026, the new edition of the Slator Index went live including self-reported revenue and growth data from over 300 companies currently active in the language solutions market. The new Slator Index replaces the legacy Slator Language Service Provider Index, which first launched in 2018.
This update comes as Slator has moved away from the Language Service Provider (LSP) term, and introduced a new market framework that categorizes companies either as Language Solutions Integrators (LSIs) or Language Technology Platforms (LTPs).
Because participation in the index is voluntary the data does tend to skew towards more-successful firms. Still, although the 2026 Index captured a broader revenue base among the companies featured, growth in the market is notably uneven.
Based on the current Index data, much of that growth is centered among a small number of individual super agencies, even as 57% of participating super agencies actually reported a revenue decline. Overall, 22.9% of total Slator Index participants reported a decrease in revenue.
With growth in the language solutions space so lopsided we posed the question to Slator readers to see how their companies were faring so far in 2026.
The responses produced a surprisingly symmetrical distribution with almost half (46.6%) of respondents reporting flat performance so far in 2026, while equal groups each representing just over a quarter (26.7%) of respondents said they were seeing either stronger or weaker performance compared to 2025.
