Intellego Platform: who will be the providers?

Hi,

Is this the direction intellego platform wants to go?

At least that’s the impression I got from the various wiki, chat discussions, etc. If I understood correctly, the aim of the intellego “platform” is not to host/run engines directly. It is rather an API / website where the actual translation task is handed out to some “provider” responsible of the translation.

Now, that’s all good and nice. Seems like a gateway to all translation services …however, before making such a gateway, the question is just: who will be the providers?

For google, bing, and all “big guys” out there, APIs are available but of course these are paid services. But if I understood correclty from Mekki’s video, there is no budget for that. Right?

This leaves us with:

  • small/startup companies: why would they join? What’s their incentive? Branding?
  • academia: this is a buisiness too. Without funds, I doubt they’ll invest the effort to provide translation services. Most of them don’t even have online demos.
  • ourselves with self-hosted engines: …however, this is a lot of work and expertise, requires infrastructures, and probably cannot be provided by a couple of volunteers working on weekends

So, it’s nice and all to want to make a platform …but who will actually provide the translations? …and how to guarantee they’ll stay in the long run?

It also raises several questions:

  • wouldn’t users be annoyed if they cannot access known providers like google or microsoft?
  • is there an infrastructure/budget planned in case it’sself hosted? …or even full-time employee?
  • if we just have a single or two unknown providers, does it make sense to make a gateway/platform at all?

Cheers!

There’s value that a large community like mozilla can have for folks doing data.

Notably, feedback and suggestions.

I bet there’s more.

Regarding established commercial providers, their business model isn’t tailored to what Intellego is intended to do.
More importantly though, their quality isn’t at a level that they’d be dearly missed, if a language pair had an alternative offer.
Or, phrased differently, this is a choice between kinda-bad and not-all-that-bad, AFAICT.