SlatorPod

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, reflecting on SlatorCon Remote and announcing that SlatorCon London 2026 is open for registration.The duo touch on IMDb’s decision to recognize dubbing artists as part of new professional credit categories, explaining how this expands visibility for multilingual voice talent. They then move on to Coursera’s strategy shift and outline how its new CEO is betting on AI translation and AI dubbing to revive slowing growth. Florian and Esther talk about Amazon’s rollout of AI-translated Kindle eBooks, and question authors' willingness to rely on automated translation despite Amazon’s promise of fast turnarounds, in as little as 72 hours.Florian highlights research on spatial audio improving AI live speech translation, and reflects on how clearer speaker differentiation could enhance comprehension. Although he stresses ongoing challenges in live settings, like latency and overlapping speech.In Esther’s M&A and funding corner, healthcare AI technology startup No Barrier raises USD 2.7m, Cisco acquires EZ Dubs to enhance WebEx’s real-time speech translation capabilities, and audio AI startup AudioShake raises USD 14m. Florian analyzes OneMeta’s financials and notes its rapid revenue growth despite significant ongoing and limited marketing presence. Esther details the landmark UK NHS framework agreement for language services, including scope and the number of awarded vendors.Florian concludes with updates on interpreting performances at Teleperformance and AMN Healthcare, noting mixed results.

Amir Haramaty, Co-Founder and President of aiOla, joins SlatorPod to talk about how spoken, multilingual data can transform enterprise workflows and unlock real ROI.The Co-Founder introduces himself not as a serial entrepreneur but as a serial problem solver, focused on one core challenge: most enterprise data remains uncaptured, unstructured, and unused.Amir emphasizes that traditional speech tech fails in real-world conditions, where accents, noise, and hyper-specific jargon dominate. He illustrates how he tackles this challenge by building workflow-specific language models that extract only the data relevant to a process.Amir says aiOla converts speech not into text but into structured, schema-ready data, allowing organizations to automate workflows, improve compliance, and identify trends long before humans can. He explains that the company focuses on narrow processes rather than general conversation, enabling precision in niche environments.Amir shares how aiOla routinely cuts multi-hour procedures down to minutes, drives efficiency across frontline roles, and creates previously unavailable datasets that feed enterprise intelligence. He highlights ROI examples from supermarkets, airlines, manufacturing, and automotive industries.Amir explains that after proving aiOla’s value, he realized the fastest way to scale was through firms already embedded in enterprise digital transformation. He notes that aiOla now partners with UST, Accenture, Salesforce, and Nvidia, creating a distribution engine capable of replicating wins across thousands of clients. He calls this channel strategy a force multiplier that shortens sales cycles and embeds aiOla inside broader modernization initiatives. Amir adds that these partners not only bring scale but also domain expertise aiOla deliberately chose not to build in-house. Amir outlines future priorities, including product-led growth, speech-based coding, and speech-prompted AI agents. He predicts that agentic systems will rely heavily on high-quality spoken data, making aiOla’s role even more central.

Tom Kocmi, Researcher at Cohere, and Alon Lavie, Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, join Florian and Slator language AI Research Analyst, Maria Stasimioti, on SlatorPod to talk about the state-of-the-art in AI translation and what the latest WMT25 results reveal about progress and remaining challenges.Tom outlines how the WMT conference has become a crucial annual benchmark for assessing AI translation quality and ensuring systems are tested on fresh, demanding datasets. He notes that systems now face literary text, social-media language, ASR-noisy speech transcripts, and data selected through a difficulty-sampling algorithm. He stresses that these harder inputs expose far more system weaknesses than in previous years.He adds that human translators also struggle as they face fatigue, time pressure, and constraints such as not being allowed to post-edit. He emphasizes that human parity claims are unreliable and highlights the need for improved human evaluation design.Alon underscores that harder test data also challenges evaluators. He explains that segment-level scoring is now more difficult, and even human evaluators miss different subsets of errors. He highlights that automated metrics built on earlier-era training data underperformed, particularly COMET, because they absorbed their own biases.He reports that the strongest performers in the evaluation task were reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs), either lightly prompted or submitted with elaborate evaluation-specific prompting. He notes that while these LLM-as-judge setups outperformed traditional neural metrics overall, their segment-level performance varied.Tom points out that the translation task also revealed notable progress from smaller academic models around 9B parameters, some ranking near trillion-parameter frontier models. He sees this as a sign that competitive research is still widely accessible.The duo concludes that they must carefully choose evaluation methods, avoid assessing models with the same metric used during training, and adopt LLM-based judging for more reliable assessments.

Nikita Agarwal, Founder of Milestone Localization, joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey founding a language solutions integrator (LSI) and launching Cavya.ai, a platform designed to streamline translation project preparation.Nikita began Milestone Localization in 2020 after discovering the language industry while working in international sales. She was drawn to the field’s global scope and low barrier to entry. She emphasizes that sales experience played a crucial role in landing early clients and understanding the value of hiring people from within the industry. The founder reflects on the past 16 months as a period of intense change marked by AI disruption, client pressure on pricing, and shifting expectations. She highlights how regulated sectors like life sciences have helped stabilize the company amid volatility. She details how the LSI specializes in medical device translations and regulatory submissions across Europe.Nikita explains that her new platform, Cavya.ai, emerged from internal needs to improve project preparation. She says the tool automates glossaries, style guides, and document analysis, reducing time and boosting consistency for small and mid-sized projects.The founder shares her observations on India’s evolving language technology landscape, noting significant progress in AI for major Indian languages. She says increased internet access and AI-driven localization are expanding education and job opportunities across the country.Nikita concludes that she sees the future in expanding life sciences work, refining Cavya, and developing an AI-powered QA tool. She notes that some clients are showing “AI fatigue” and returning to human-led workflows.

Thordur Arnason, Global AI GTM Lead at Capgemini Invent, joins SlatorPod to talk about how the consulting giant is embracing language AI through BabelSpeak, its new real-time AI speech translation platform.Thordur explains that the idea emerged from Capgemini’s AI Futures Lab while researching multimodal AI. Inspired by Meta’s launch of the Seamless M4T model, the team set out to tackle the hard problem of live AI speech translation.He notes that early pilots with DNB Bank, the Norwegian Red Cross, and the Norwegian Police tested BabelSpeak in critical situations — from refugee banking access to emergency communication.Thordur highlights Capgemini’s partnerships with Nvidia and Telenor, saying Nvidia provides the AI hardware and models, while Telenor’s sovereign AI infrastructure ensures security, GDPR compliance, and data sovereignty.He emphasizes that BabelSpeak’s reliability comes not just from AI models but from engineering precision, reducing latency from three seconds to under 300 milliseconds.Thordur discusses Capgemini’s exploration of agentic AI, where autonomous systems perceive, reason, and act independently. He describes how the company built an “Agentic Workbench” to help non-technical users experiment with AI agents safely and sees BabelSpeak as a potential tool within larger agentic systems.He concludes that Capgemini is expanding BabelSpeak into a broader suite of language tools, combining secure AI infrastructure with advanced multilingual communication for enterprise and government clients.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with congratulations to Villam Language Services on its sale to InAnyLanguage. Slator served as joint exclusive advisor with Maveria Advisory, representing Villam throughout the end-to-end M&A process.The duo turns to Perplexity’s Localization Manager job posting, which they found almost identical to OpenAI’s earlier post, down to matching structure, order, and phrasing. They question whether copying such a specific ad shows a lack of seriousness or simply reflects practicality and efficiency.Esther and Florian talk about RWS's new leadership hires: Stephen Lamb as Chief Financial Officer and Michael Wayne as Head of Media and Entertainment. Esther outlines how the appointments strengthen RWS’s investment strategy in media localization, dubbing, and content adaptation.Esther next mentions that Visual Data has named Maz Al-Jumaili as SVP of Worldwide Localization, to lead subtitling and dubbing operations and strengthen client partnerships.The duo wrap up with the UK government’s bizarre energy-efficiency study, claiming AI translation is a thousand times greener than human translation. They review the flawed logic, where the report assigns human translators the entire office energy costs while excluding AI infrastructure.

Tom Bridges, CEO and Founder of CaptionHub, joins SlatorPod to talk about how a small in-house tool evolved into a global AI-powered multimedia localization platform. Tom began his career in post-production and visual effects before stumbling into subtitling when a client needed to localize a video into 16 languages overnight. He reveals that the disorganized workflows relying on spreadsheets inspired him to create a more efficient, centralized solution, which became CaptionHub.Tom explains that CaptionHub has since grown from a subtitling tool into a full multimedia localization platform integrating speech recognition, machine translation, and synthetic voice. He adds that the platform’s strength lies in being AI-agnostic and offering end-to-end workflows that balance automation with human-in-the-loop processes.Tom describes how CaptionHub’s new product suite, Timbra, enables real-time media localization and has already supported major live events. He says live captioning is technically complex but benefits from the company’s years of research into video-on-demand subtitling quality.Tom notes that accessibility regulations like the European Accessibility Act are driving demand, while AI and language models are opening new frontiers such as lip-sync and sign-language integration. Tom envisions a future where speech-to-speech translation, synthetic dubbing, and real-time localization merge into seamless, scalable experiences. CaptionHub’s mission remains to make multimedia communication universally accessible and efficient through human and AI collaboration.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with breaking news that DeepL is reportedly exploring an initial public offering (IPO) in the US at a potential USD 5bn valuation. This comes as DeepL now positions itself as a “global AI product and research company”. Florian also notes the launch of DeepL Marketplace and the appointment of Gonçalo Gaiolas as Chief Product Officer.Florian opens with the first-ever Slator Award at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where Guy Ratnitsky won for his thesis on data security and confidentiality in AI. The program will soon be renamed MA in Multilingual Communication Management to reflect market realities.The duo turns to Anthropic’s new Economic Index, which shows translators and interpreters make up 0.63% of Claude AI usage, while OpenAI data previously showed translation-related conversations at 4.5%. Florian unpacks comments from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who, during a visit to Spain, suggested AI could replace EU interpreters in the medium term. He explains that Spain is pushing for Catalan, Basque, and Galician to become official EU languages, but Merz cited translation workload and complexity.Florian and Esther then run through live AI speech translation updates: Zoom’s in-house rollout, Apple’s AirPods, Google’s translation features, Microsoft’s API, and Meta’s Ray-Bans.In Esther’s M&A corner, she reports on Bering Lab’s acquisition of Intersphere in Korea and Iyuno’s partnership with Motion Picture Solutions in the UK for a film localization pipeline. Meanwhile, Testronic secured funding to scale down in some locations while expanding in Manila as a hub for QA testing and localization.

Alex Edwards, Senior Research Analyst at Slator and based in Madrid, delves into the shifting landscape of language technology. He discusses ElevenLabs' pivot to offering managed services like dubbing and transcription, priced at $22 per minute. The conversation also highlights YouTube's new multilingual audio feature, enhancing AI dubbing opportunities. Insights on OpenAI's findings show translation is a major ChatGPT use case, while Microsoft introduces a Live Interpreter API for real-time speech translation. Lastly, Mistral's significant funding aims to boost European AI innovation.

Dive into the buzzing world of localization as the hosts recap the vibrant SlatorCon, emphasizing the impactful discussions and strong turnout. Hear about Cohere's exciting launch of Command A Translate, focusing on 20 high-quality languages. There's also news on TransPerfect's acquisition of Unbabel, promising to integrate innovative AI tools. Plus, enjoy a humorous take on Apple's AirPods Pro 3 featuring live AI translation. Finally, catch insights from the Inc. 5000 rankings, showcasing impressive growth and challenges within the language industry.