Language Technologies Market for Brazil

Executive Summary

Brazil’s current language technologies market, valued at around $200 million¹, represents a small fraction (around 5 percent) of its potential. Indeed, the present administration’s policy of “digital inclusion” as a mechanism for social inclusion suggests significant future demand for a wide range of language technologies. The combination of a stable economy and the attention placed by corporate Brazil on increasing operational efficiency will also spur demand for these technologies.

At present, close to three quarters of all software in Brazil is imported; however, the Brazilian government aims to reduce the country’s reliance on imports while increasing exports and to that end is promoting the globalization of its IT sector through funding and programs to support local industry. Emphasis has been placed on domestic software development and on increasing Brazil’s share of the outsourced software development market, in particular from U.S. customers.

Although Brazil’s language technologies sector is emerging (less than four years old), the number of domestic players is growing. Mergers and acquisitions, partnerships between niche software developers and large transnational systems integrators are becoming more common. Companies are also buying competitors’ product lines in order to create complementary product packages.

The growing popularity of corporate call centres, business centres, and the convergence of computers and telephony is spurring the market for a range of voice/language processing solutions. Voice-activated Internet portals, automated attendants and assistive products for the disabled are just a few of the possible applications for such voice and language processing technologies as text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-speech (STS), automatic voice response (AVR), interactive voice response (IVR), and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).

Software imported into Brazil must first be translated into Brazilian Portuguese, which is the country’s official language.

Little demand has been identified in Brazil for English- or French-language training software or translation software, although English, French (and Spanish) are spoken. The main opportunities lie in content management and voice and language processing.