SlatorPod

Tony Abrahams , CEO and Co-founder of Ai-Media , joins SlatorPod to talk about the journey to building a market leader in multilingual live captioning . Tony discusses his transition from working in finance to co-founding Ai-Media with Alex Jones and introducing large-scale captioning to Australian Pay TV. He gives an overview of Ai-Media’s technology stack, which delivers high-quality automatic c...

This week, SlatorPod hosts its very first panel debate with guests Adam Bittlingmayer, CEO of ModelFront , Varshul Gupta, Co-founder of Dubverse , and Mihai Vlad, General Manager of Language Weaver . To start off, the panel participants reflect on their recent experience with ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022 and how this shapes their views on large language models ( LLMs ). Varshul and Ad...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Christian Federmann , Principal Research Manager at Microsoft , where he works on machine translation ( MT ) evaluation and language expansion. Christian recounts his journey from working at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence under the guidance of AI pioneer Hans Uszkoreit to joining Microsoft and building out Microsoft Translator . He...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Nikola Nikolov , an experienced researcher, engineer, YouTuber , and consultant in natural language processing ( NLP ) and machine learning . Nikola talks about the evolution of large language models ( LLMs ), where the core technology remains the same, but the number of parameters has grown exponentially and the capacity to fine-tune models on human data...

Florian and Esther are back for a packed news pod. The two catch up with OpenAI announcing the release of its much anticipated GPT-4 large language model . They unpack OpenAI’s research on GPT or GPT-powered systems’ impact on the labor force, including specifics around how exposed translators and interpreters are to large language models. Over at the University of Edinburgh, researchers looked at...

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 imp...

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 f...

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...

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 h...

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 rev...

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, specifica...

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 f...

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. Ramsr...

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...

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...

Tanya Bogin, Managing Director of Craft London , joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s end-to-end creative production services across all media channels and languages. Tanya discusses her route into the language industry; from working as a radio station manager to entering the transcreation industry with Craft. She talks about how the company brings creative ideas to life through cultural ad...

In this week’s SlatorPod, LXT Chief Growth Officer Phil Hall joins us to talk about the company’s journey, from providing high-quality Arabic data for a Big Tech company to expanding into 750 languages. Phil shares his background teaching linguistics and leading business development for Appen before joining LXT. He discusses the key findings from The Path to AI Majority report, from the maturity l...

Google ’s Head of Product, Translation AI, Mallika Iyer, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the company’s new Translation Hub .  Mallika begins with her journey from software engineer to leading all of the translation products for Google Cloud , most recently Translation Hub . She shares the motivation behind launching the hub , where they saw that overall demand for translation had increased, but...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the hype surrounding ChatGPT . Slator joined in by prompting ChatGPT to answer questions as if it were a translation manager . After reports back in November 2022 stated that DeepL was in the final stretch of closing a major investment round, DeepL has finally confirmed that it raised funds from VCs at a billion-dollar valuati...

In this week’s SlatorPod, Happy Scribe CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling. André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of transcription and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina. The CEO shares how their product developm...

In the final SlatorPod episode of 2022, we are joined by Marco Trombetti , cofounder and CEO of Italy-based LSP Translated . Marco joins us two years on from our episode with Translated’s other cofounder, Isabelle Andrieu . Marco breaks down the LSP’s Singularity in AI research project and defines what singularity means in translation. He walks us through the process and the vast data collection e...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Mark Lawyer, General Manager of Trados , the key technology product line of UK-based Super Agency RWS . Trados is a translation technology adopted by hundreds of thousands of freelance translators, LSPs, and enterprise customers — the three main market segments of the localization supply chain. Mark begins with his journey to joining the localization indu...

DeepL launches then pulls new AI-based writing tool, translator and interpreter employment declines in Germany, job index dips for fourth time in 2022, Blu Digital Group expands further into media localization , and Deluxe buys Post Haste Digital .

Joining SlatorPod this week is Ev Fedorenko , Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT . Ev also runs EvLab , an MIT language lab that discovers how the human brain creates language. Ev talks about the different hypotheses concerning the origin of language and how it has likely been a gradual evolution. She shares a number of intriguing research fi...

In this week’s episode, Florian is joined by Anna Wyndham, Senior Research Analyst at Slator. The two discuss the language industry news of the week, with a recap of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum held in Sweden last week. The NTIF covered a broad range of presentations, including a talk from Ikea about how they are building a custom machine translation (MT) engine from scratch. In startup...