The Blackbird Roost | Issue #6 | July 2026

👋 Hi, this is Brunó and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Four issues in and we're still here, which in newsletter years makes us practically an institution. Catch up on Issue #1, Issue #2, Issue #3, Issue #4 (a 75% open rate, which either means you love us or means four of you have very generous email habits), and our special post-LocWorld edition .

Let's get into it.​

One year, zero regrets (mostly)

Dan Milczarski hit his one-year workiversary, and we made him sit for an interview about it, because that's what workiversaries are for. His guiding mantra is Connect, Automate, Innovate — three words that sound like a productivity poster but that Dan has apparently used to survive two decades of language services, dirty legacy TMs, and the exact moment at LocWorld Dublin when orchestration stopped being a nice-to-have and became the thing everyone suddenly, urgently needed. Dan's real argument: the danger was never moving too fast on AI. It was not moving at all.
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Read the whole interview 👇
​https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/celebrating-1-year-workiversary-dan-milczarski-blackbirdiohq-4ljze​

An analyst read our homework and gave us a passing grade

Our favorite CSA Research analyst, Arle Lommel published a full briefing on Blacklake, and — this is the part we like to quote at dinner parties — he noted that Blacklake maintains a continuously updated record of content, metadata, decisions, and transformations, rather than just stashing translated segments the way traditional TM does. In other words: it remembers how the sausage was made, not just the sausage.
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We secured distribution rights, so you can download the full briefing for free instead of taking our word for it.

Happy Canada Day, eh

We celebrated by doing what any reasonable company does on a Canadian national holiday — talking about our expanding Canadian footprint. New partnerships with Apertera (formerly Alexa Translations), expansion with Cohere, a specialized English–Canadian French QE model built with TAUS, and Canadian data residency on Azure for anyone whose legal team gets nervous about where bits physically live. There's also a personal reflection on the Toronto years that shaped Blacklake, for readers who like their product updates with a side of nostalgia. See you in Vancouver this October for TAUS and LocWorld!

​Read more about Blackbird's Toronto roots and our Canadian activities >>​

Focus on the Product -- New Releases

Logs & Notifications

Logs & Notifications are now live for everyone, everywhere — no waitlist, no "coming to your region eventually." True to our word, we shipped it API-first: "Get latest notifications," "Get Bird logs," "Get Flight logs," and an "On notifications received" webhook event all shipped alongside the UI, not six months after it, which is rarer than it should be in this industry.
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​Check out Mathijs's video walkthrough!
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Native .po .docx and .pptx support

Native .po, .docx, and .pptx support has landed in Blacklake and our LLM apps. You can now send a .docx straight to OpenAI with no conversion gymnastics in between — a small technical step, but a real relief for anyone who has spent an afternoon fighting file formats instead of doing their actual job. Native .xlsx support is next.

New Apps

Six new app integrations joined the roster: Apertera (AI), Payload (CMS), Traduno (TMS), Smartsheet (productivity), Bitbucket Cloud (dev), and Optimizely (CMS). All tech docs are posted online, as usual, for the three people who read tech docs for fun (hey, I'm one of them!!).

Q3 Targets

Figma Enterprise (Variables support, the genuinely exciting part), ServiceNow (the last major Enterprise Work and Project Management gap in our roster), and Veeva — our first real step into life sciences and healthcare, a sector that does not forgive sloppy content operations.
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Podcast Corner

Hey hey, a new podcast episode! Mark Jones from Comtec Translations joined Dan Milczarski as they talked some World Cup, NFL and oh yeah, if AI can handle brand voice. Check it out:

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Phrase + Blackbird: The Ecosystem Multiplier for Localization

Phrase and Blackbird have been integrated for years now, across Phrase TMS, Phrase Strings, and Phrase Language AI, and customers keep telling us Blackbird has become what they call an "ecosystem multiplier" — their words, we're not above stealing a good phrase. Companies including Emerson–National Instruments, FloHealth, Notion, Remote, Toast, Miro, Square, Weex, DeepL, Acclaro, and Global Lingo already run on the combination: Phrase for localization management, Blackbird to connect localization to everything else the business does.

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Homework, if you want it

Everyone keeps asking about Blacklake, so here are three videos instead of us explaining it over email for the tenth time: ​
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Blacklake - Basics

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Blacklake - Diffing
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Blacklake - Native Editing

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Thanks for being part of the Blackbird community. We'll be returning with the Blackbird Roost August edition next month!
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Each issue of The 'Roost brings a curated mix of what matters: practical insights from the field, fresh thinking on where content and language operations are headed, product updates you can actually use, and a bit of fun along the way. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here. If you'd rather not know, unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings, we'll assume you've found peace elsewhere.

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