Faes predicts 2025 will bring multilingual audio tracks to YouTube; a super agency acquisition or merger; and major regulatory changes in the US language access framework.
Inés de la Iglesia, Content and Translation & Localization Manager at Talent.com, detailed the job search platform’s journey from an outdated translation database to an efficient, automated translation management system (TMS).
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AI By Any Other Name
Next up, Slator Senior Research Analyst Alex Edwards moderated a panel on the impact of generative AI (or GenAI) tools on businesses. He was joined by Richard Pinegar, Technical Publications Services Manager at Atlas Copco Group, and Roeland Hofkens, Chief Product & Technology Officer at LanguageWire.Â
As a client, Pinegar wants AI to help him focus on writing in English, while language service providers handle translation. Hofkens believes GenAI via a chain of agents checking and improving output will become the norm.
Unbabel Senior Research Scientists Ricardo Rei and Nuno Miguel Guerreiro discussed the current state of the art in AI translation, with Slator Research Analyst Maria Stasimioti moderating. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they agreed the field has been transformed by large language models (LLMs), to the point that LLM research may eventually crowd out work on machine translation (MT).
Bureau Works Founder and CEO Gabriel Fairman, who explored the differences between AI assistants and AI agents, sees a shift from evaluating linguistic quality to measuring outcomes and effectiveness.
Faes returned to moderate a conversation on startups with Anuja Dhawan, co-founder of Indian video audio localization platform Dubverse, and Lucas Campa, co-founder of AI simultaneous speech interpreter toby. Both must decide what to build in-house versus add on top, even as new tools seem to be released each week.
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Avatars and Cannibals
HeyGen CTO Rong Yan explained that video creation startup HeyGen automatically translates a source video into one of about 70 languages, modifying the avatar’s lip sync to align with the target language, and even changing the speed of speech to match the language.Â
HeyGen currently has 10 million users and is often used for eLearning, though Yan suggested its newest product, an interactive avatar, could act as a conversation partner for language learning.
Lastly, Slator Senior Research Analyst and Editor RocÃo Txabarriaga moderated a conversation between KUDO Founder and CEO Fardad Zabetian and CTO Claudio Fantinuoli on balancing human interpreting with rapidly advancing technology. Zabetian said that rather than cannibalizing existing revenue, as Zabetian feared, AI interpreting has cost KUDO almost no existing human interpreting customers.
Human-AI interaction in language services will undoubtedly be a hot topic in the year ahead.
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