What's new

Gate Management SMS conversations between warehouse operators and drivers can now be translated automatically, in both directions, using AI. A driver who speaks Spanish and an operator who works in English can each read and write in their own language, in the same conversation thread, with no extra steps on either side.

Problem it solves

Gate Management SMS/WhatsApp messages were only ever delivered in the warehouse's language (or a generic country level greeting). Drivers who didn't speak that language could miss instructions or get delayed at the gate, and there was no way to detect or translate a live operator to driver chat. This showed up as a recurring blocker for international expansion and multilingual driver pools.

How it works

• At check in (Comet), the driver selects their language from a list of supported options. This choice, together with the driver's prior selection if any, determines the driver side language for the conversation.
• The warehouse side language is set automatically from the warehouse's country (for example, a US warehouse defaults to English, a Mexican warehouse to Spanish).
• Every manual chat message sent by either side is translated before delivery. The original text is always preserved and stays visible, with the translation shown alongside it.
• If both sides already speak the same language, nothing is translated and no translation UI appears.
• If the translation service times out or fails (5 second cap), the message is still delivered in its original language rather than being blocked. This "fail open" behavior means an outage never stops a conversation from working, it just stops being translated.

Supported languages

Language support is inherited from the check in flow and the warehouse's country. Confirmed at the warehouse level today: English, Spanish (Mexico), Portuguese (Brazil), and French (Canada). The driver side check in flow currently supports 9 language options [likely, based on the epic description; the full list should be confirmed with the Ignite team before publishing].

Turning translation on or off

• Operators (Helios): a conversation level toggle turns translation off for that thread. This applies to the whole conversation, not per operator, and does not retroactively change messages already shown.
• Drivers (SMS/WhatsApp): replying with a keyword such as "STOP TRANSLATE" (or the localized equivalent, for example "PARAR TRADUÇÃO" or "DETENER TRADUCCIÓN") turns off translation for that driver. The keyword is parsed as a command and is not shown to the operator as a chat message.

Where to access it

Gate Management must be enabled for the warehouse. 

What is not included yet

A few things called out explicitly as out of scope for this first release, worth stating plainly so support and customers don't expect them:

• No translation of the initial automated check in greeting or other templated/automated messages yet. That work (translating system messages to both drivers and warehouse operators) is in progress and currently on staging, not yet released. 
• No retroactive translation of message history from before translation was turned on.
• No per operator or per user language preference; language is set at the warehouse level, however, we do have dynamic translation.
• No voice, video, or document translation, and no translation for check in itself (that is a separate, in house tokenization project, not this one).