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Papercup, a UK artificial intelligence start-up has raised $20 million in a Series A investment round to help grow its translation and dubbing software. This latest announcement brings total funding to $30.5m with backers including Sky, Octopus Ventures, LocalGlobe, Sands Capital, and GMG Ventures.

Papercup was founded in 2017 by Jesse Sheman and Jiameng Gao with a mission to make all the world’s videos watchable in any language. The AI company uses machine learning as part of a text-to-speech system capable of translating people’s voices into other languages, with a delivery that is indistinguishable from human speech. Customers just have to upload their videos, choose a target language and then receive a translated version with a synthetic voiceover. One finer point however is that there is still a ‘human in the loop’, as translators annotate the content which is auto transcribed, translated and dubbed by AI. Ultimately you would want the solutions to be completely autonomous.

According to Papercup the technology has already been used by media giants Sky News, Discovery, and Business Insider, and was used to translate 30 seasons of Bob Ross’ iconic show ‘The Joy of Painting’. Papercup claim the service can run at 1/5th of the standard costs with turnaround times in hours and days rather than weeks or months.

There is certainly a huge potential market for solutions such as that offered by Papercup, as while dubbing of foreign languages has certainly improved over the years, it can often be difficult and expensive. Netflix for example have made a big push in the last few years of introducing foreign content such as Squid game and Norsemen. So, if it can deliver as promised this could open up the world of content for global audiences, regardless of language.

Posted by: Simon Baxter at 08:42

Tags: funding   AI  

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