SlatorPod

Voiseed CEO and Co-founder Andrea Ballista joins SlatorPod to discuss the machine dubbing startup’s approach to operating and developing their AI-based virtual voice engine, Revoiceit. Andrea talks about how his passion for music as a child led him to founding audio localization studio Binari Sonori, which he sold to Keywords Studios in 2014, and why he is now launching Voiseed.He shares his impressions from this year’s Game Developers Conference where there was a lot of interest in new technologies, voice cloning solutions, and the development of emotional synthetic voices.Andrea unpacks Revoiceit’s ability to understand the voice and emotional profile of the user and transfer both profiles into the target language. Voiseed has been profiling vocal delivery and creating a data set, so the system can have a wider knowledge of human emotion in terms of voice and language.On the topic of large language models (LLMs), Andrea is not worried about the implications of LLMs like ChatGPT as they have had two years to build a dataset on vast amounts of voice content. He talks about Voiseed’s early financial backers and shares the story behind applying for blended finance (grants and equity) from the European Innovation Council Fund and LIFTT.Andrea shares his experience hiring during the lockdown and their approach to investing in ‘cool’ people and helping them grow through their incentive plan. The pod wraps up with Voiseed’s product roadmap, where they aim to improve features with more emotion control and work on how to create new voices that can be used in multiple projects.

Liane Kirsch, CEO of Cinescript, joins SlatorPod to talk about specializing in the audiovisual industry and working with global TV and film productions.Liane discusses her route into the language industry, from studying philology and translating contracts to working as an on-set interpreter and dialogue coach for international productions. Throughout this journey she founded Cinescript and for five years she built her client base parallel to her other work.Liane shares her experience as a polyglot fluent in six languages and how she uses the melodies of languages in her learning process. She talks about the complexities behind translating screenplays, where the process involves one translator and one proofreader each for the source and target language.She reveals how they supported the production of Netflix’s series 1899 by translating the synopsis, polishing 8 different screenplays, dialogue coaching for Cantonese, and working on additional dialogue recording in post-production.The pod rounds off with Liane’s initiatives for 2023, including offering internships for international students and strengthening their main team in the office. 

Mark Howorth, CEO of VSI, joins SlatorPod to talk about his plans for leading and scaling the media localization provider.Mark discusses his route into the media and entertainment (M&E) and language space as well as his path to joining VSI. Mark took up his role at the leading media localization provider in January 2023 after spending five years as the CEO of SDI Media including overseeing the company’s sale to Iyuno in 2021. He outlines how the media localization industry has evolved with the streaming boom impacting turnaround times. Mark also shares some of the challenges of hiring and retaining media localization talent internally and externally post-Covid. He offers his thoughts on the use of machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) as productivity enhancers, rather than a replacement for human subtitling.Mark talks about VSI’s historically self-funded growth and highlights the company’s plans to scale further in 2023 and beyond. Mark shares some of the growth drivers behind VSI on the back of +20% growth in 2022. The CEO reveals key initiatives for VSI in 2023, such as building dubbing capacity, widening its customer base, and geographical expansion. The pod rounds off with Mark’s 2-3 year outlook on the media localization market in terms of customer demands. 

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by David Orrego-Carmona, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick to discuss his research on language technologies, audiovisual translation, and users of translation.David shares his background studying translation in Colombia and how it led to the formation of a research group focusing on audiovisual translation and subtitling. He outlines how he is developing Translation Studies at Warwick, not only to teach students about translation and culture, but so they can have a direct link to the industry. David reveals the key findings from his PhD on the production of interlingual subtitles, where he used eye-tracking to track reading behaviors of non-professional and professional subtitles. He talks about how multilingual content like Netflix’s Sense8 and 1899 is changing the perception of subtitling.David challenges the idea of the invisibility of subtitles as users between the age of 18 and 24 in the UK are more likely to use intralingual subtitles in English.David gives his thoughts on the age-old debate of subtitling versus dubbing, where there is no right answer as both modes of translation are efficient and can convey meaning. He talks about how non-professional translators are implementing machine translation in a more informed and educated way through pre-editing.David discusses why it’s important for students to learn about the requirements of different media in subtitling, including short-form content like YouTube and TikTok. He touches on the impact of ChatGPT on academia, from plagiarism to integrating large language models into the curriculum.The pod rounds off with David’s current research projects, the first on understanding how people watch subtitles and the second on how machine translation is used by local authorities, NGOs, and charities in the UK.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the world’s most popular YouTuber, MrBeast, launching a dubbing services company called Creator Global. MrBeast’s latest entrepreneurial move comes as YouTube confirmed it will roll out its multi-track audio to thousands more users.Over in Australia, Ai-Media shared its financial results for the first half of 2023, with revenues remaining flat and EBITDA edging up a bit. When asked about ChatGPT, Ai-Media CEO Tony Abrahams said that it did not pose a threat to the access service provider.Data-for-AI provider Appen released “far from satisfactory” results for full-year 2022 as revenues decreased 13% to USD 388.5m. Appen’s results may puzzle some as AI is undergoing perhaps the greatest hype cycle ever.Researchers at Microsoft have been conducting experiments comparing large language model GPT to other machine translation (MT) systems. The results concluded that GPT models achieved competitive MT quality for high-resource languages, but did not perform well for low-resource languages.AMN Healthcare revealed in a February 2023 earnings call that in-house Language Services has reportedly doubled its revenues since the 2020 acquisition of Stratus Video. Overall, AMN revenues were up 32% in 2022 to more than USD 5.2m, but declined by 17% in Q4.The duo talk about the Slator 2023 Language Service Provider Index, which features nearly 350 companies in total, with a combined US-dollar revenue of nearly USD 10.4bn. Esther highlights the fastest growing LSPs and breaks down growth among Super Agencies, Leaders, Challengers, and Boutiques.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Gráinne Maycock, to discuss her role as Chief Revenue Officer at Super Agency Acolad.Gráinne begins with her journey studying translation and interpreting to working in various sales and account management roles, before the LSP she worked for was acquired by Acolad. She then talks about how her role as Chief Revenue Officer goes beyond sales, specifically collaborating with marketing, solutions, support, and operations to improve customer experience and growth.Gráinne highlights the importance of creating a sense of team through a common vision, communication, shared tech stack, and Acolad’s sales playbook. She discusses the Super Agency’s approach to managing clashing sales territories and verticals.When it comes to incentivizing top performing salespeople, Gráinne shares why they use best-in-breed compensation and best practices from parallel industries. She believes that the language industry will evolve to embrace technologies like ChatGPT and large language models if they’re clever. The pod rounds off with Gráinne’s initiatives for the next year as she continues to evolve the solutions playbook, solidify and expand talent, and support salespeople with their sales academy.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with highlights from Slator’s latest Game Localization Report. The 100-page report outlines the role that localization plays in bringing games to life and onto the market.In funding news, former Keywords Studios’ Exec, Andrea Ballista, raised EUR 1m in a seed round for his new machine dubbing venture, Voiseed. The funds will go towards Voiseed’s voice platform, Revoiceit, by improving its patented AI core technology and proprietary emotional multilingual dataset.Former SlatorPod guest and ADAPT Centre’s MT researcher Yasmin Moslem co-authored a paper recently on whether GPT-3 — the large language model behind ChatGPT — is capable of enhancing “adaptive MT."The European Commission are putting out a EUR 20m tender for Natural Language Understanding and Interaction in Advanced Language Technologies. The RFP will be open until 29 March 2023 and currently has 37 applicants offering their expertise.Over in North America, Public Services and Procurement Canada were required to report on the steps that they were taking to protect the health and safety of federal interpreters. The order came from Canada’s Labor Program following an increase in incidents linked to sound quality, including an October 2022 injury that sent an interpreter to the hospital.

Ramsri Goutham Golla joins SlatorPod to talk about his creator journey in AI SaaS (software-as-a-service), AI consulting, and AI courses.Ramsri discusses his shift from software engineer in Silicon Valley to entrepreneur in India with AI SaaS apps Questgen.ai, Supermeme.ai, and Supertranslate.ai. He shares how a “build in public” strategy can help inspire people to follow your journey.Ramsri talks about his blended approach to building products, marketing, and driving his social media channels. He touches on his most recent project, Supertranslate, which is powered by OpenAI's Whisper for its one-click subtitle generation.Ramsri shares how to build quickly on large language models like Whisper on a serverless GPU infrastructure and by partnering with developers who can build the front end. He gives his thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT on micro SaaS businesses and companies that have built on GPT-3.Ramsri outlines some of the movers in the data science space that have propelled innovation, from serverless GPUs and open-source machine learning to vector search companies. He talks about how to form a startup in India, including tips on logistics, operations, hiring, and whether to raise funding or not.The pod rounds off with Ramsri’s plans for the future, where he aims to eventually settle on one project full-time and sell off the others.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect sharing its financial results for 2022. The Super Agency grew by 4.6% to USD 1.16bn in 2022. CEO, Phil Shawe, disclosed that half the growth was organic and the other half was attributed to M&A.Natural language processing startup, Cohere, is reportedly raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of more than six billion dollars. Alongside ChatGPT and Anthropic, this funding is the latest nod to the ongoing hype in all things AI.In the UK, a report was released revealing how much the Nation Health Service (NHS) spent on interpreting services over three years. The NHS' spending came under scrutiny from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which lobbies to “cut waste [and] reform taxes and public services”.Esther talks about Iyuno’s recent strategic investment in Turkish subtitling and dubbing provider, Ak’la Kara International. This move strengthens the US-headquartered media localizer’s presence in the EMEA region and expands its capacity for Turkish dubbing.At the end of January, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation announced a forthcoming call for tenders for TRAD23. TRAD23 is a contract for the translation of EU documents from and into EU official languages and will cover more than one million pages per year.Florian discusses some of the announcements made at Google’s Live From Paris event (including additions to Google Translate), which saw Google Bard’s AI chatbot give the wrong answer at its launch, impacting Alphabet’s share price.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with a sneak peek into the brand new Slator 2022 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report. Spanning 44 pages, the report covers 62 M&A transactions and 18 startup and tech funding rounds. Following the latest research in ChatGPT, Intento published an article comparing ChatGPT translations to translations done by other stock MT engines. Florian discusses the results with ChatGPT performing well for English to Spanish but found lacking for English to German.The Committee for Organizing the Olympic and Paralympic Games is looking for an interpreting technology provider who can offer a platform for remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI). The winning candidate will supply an RSI platform for more than 60 interpreters working in 11 languages before and during the Games.Esther shares her experience watching Netflix’s 1899, which brought together nine source languages, and a number of translated versions: 14 dubbed languages and 32 subtitle options. The one-season series was distributed in 58 countries and was made up of an international cast and crew. Over in Ireland and London, Keywords Studios are seeing a healthy demand for game localization after posting 22% organic growth in the second half of 2022. The gaming services giant expects full-year revenue and profits to slightly exceed previous guidance.