SlatorPod

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past couple of weeks, beginning with the newly released 2026 Slator Language AI 50 Under 50 , which tracks emerging startups less than 50 months old.  The duo observe how this year’s cohort reflects a shift from standalone language technologies toward AI solutions built around complete business workflows. They also highlight seven trends...

Slator's Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss key highlights from the Slator Data-for-AI Market Report , which sizes the global market at USD 9.3bn and examines the ecosystem supplying the data needed to train, adapt, align, evaluate, and deploy AI systems. Anna explains how the market has evolved far beyond traditional data labeling. While annotation and large-scale training data...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, beginning with a recap of SlatorCon London , which attracted a record 250 attendees.  They highlight growing interest in language AI, startup innovation, and research, as well as a broader shift in industry sentiment toward viewing LSIs and LTPs as integral parts of the AI economy rather than businesses being disrupted fr...

Sharath Narayana, CEO and Co-Founder of Sanas , joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of real-time speech AI, the rise of accent harmonization, and why voice will become the next major enterprise interface. Sharath traces his journey from engineer to entrepreneur, including the founding of Observe. AI before launching Sanas alongside Stanford researchers focused on solving low-latency speech...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks and Slator’s newly launched website , which reflects a clearer positioning around research, advisory, consulting, events, and market intelligence. The duo breaks down the 2026 Slator Index , highlighting that while revenues appear to have grown, this does not signal real market expansion. Instead, growth is concentrated am...

Paul Carr, CEO of Welo Global , joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s strategic repositioning, continued AI investment, and evolving demand in the language solutions industry. Paul notes that the company has narrowed its focus to a few core areas and reorganized around client segments. He adds that client centricity and specialization have been central themes, alongside increased investment...

Ben Faes, CEO of RWS , joins SlatorPod to talk about the markets’ perceptions of LSIs, the company’s AI strategy, and how RWS is repositioning itself for long-term growth. Ben positions RWS as a technology-led partner helping enterprises operate globally, from enabling multilingual communication to protecting intellectual property and improving market understanding. The CEO highlights the rapid ac...

Jessica Powell, CEO of AudioShake , joins SlatorPod to talk about how AI-powered audio separation is making audio more usable for both human and machine workflows, and enabling new use cases across localization, broadcasting, and media production.  Jessica emphasizes that early traction came from the music industry, particularly in areas like sync licensing and remixing. However, the company’s exp...

Daniel Sebesta joins Florian and Esther on the pod to talk about the latest language industry news, AI translation developments, and key insights from the Slator Pro Guide: Growth Hacks for Language Technology Platforms (LTPs). The trio begin with TransPerfect’s latest financial results , which reported USD 1.32 billion in revenue, up 7% year on year. They also discuss leadership changes at Strake...

Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase , returns to SlatorPod for round 3 to talk about how the language technology platform (LTP) is evolving amid the AI boom and the shifting dynamics in enterprise SaaS. Georg shares how Phrase has doubled down on a platform and ecosystem strategy that encourages customers to build solutions on top of the LTP’s system rather than forcing them into a closed system. The CEO add...

Daphne Tay, Founder and CEO of Bluente , joins SlatorPod to talk about building an AI-powered document translation platform that goes beyond text and tackles the complexities of formatting at scale. Daphne explains that formatting challenges vary significantly across file types, from scanned PDFs to multi-column layouts and complex graphics, requiring deep technical handling of document structures...

Slator’s Head of Research Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss Slator’s new Pro Guide: Growth Hacks for Language Technology Platforms , describing it as a practical playbook for turning strong AI products into scalable revenue. Florian highlights ElevenLabs’ USD 500m raise at an USD 11bn valuation and Synthesia’s USD 200m round as evidence that investor appetite for voice AI is acceler...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, starting with senior hires in revenue and operations at DeepL and what this signals about the LTP’s next phase. The duo then turns to new data from AI labs and hyperscalers, where Florian highlights findings from Anthropic’s research showing AI is settling into a support role rather than full automation, with usage concen...

JC Penet, Reader in Translation Industry Studies at Newcastle University, and Joss Moorkens, Associate Professor at DCU, join SlatorPod to talk about the new open-access book Teaching translation in the age of generative AI: New paradigm, new learning? The duo explains how large language models (LLMs) have a different impact than earlier machine translation breakthroughs as they generate human-lik...

In the 2025 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond reflect on a year defined by rapid AI investment, shifting policy, and structural change across the language industry. Esther opens the year-in-review by highlighting January’s twin funding milestones in the language AI and product space. Florian follows with February, which saw hyperscalers and AI labs release data high...

Josh Miller and Christopher Antunes, Co-Founders and co-CEOs of 3Play Media , join SlatorPod to talk about the company’s trajectory as a leading language solutions integrator (LSI) in multilingual video accessibility. The duo explains how the two met at MIT, where an early challenge from OpenCourseWare revealed that captioning thousands of technical videos was financially impossible, leading to th...

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 shif...

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...

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 ben...

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...

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 ha...

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, do...

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 in...

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...

Slator’s Senior Research Analyst Alex Edwards joins Esther and Florian on the pod to discuss ElevenLabs ’ move from a pure-play language technology platform (LTP) to becoming a language solutions integrator (LSI) by adding a managed service offering. He outlines that the LSI will now offer managed services such as dubbing, transcription, and subtitling, hiring in-house linguists and vendor manager...