Zoom Acquires An AI Company Building Real-Time Translation

Zoom has acquired a real-time machine translation company called Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – Kites. The company seeks to leverage Kites’ resources to improve the productivity and efficiency of meetings on Zoom by providing users with real-time multilingual translation capabilities. Zoom says that “Kites’ talented team of 12 researchers will help their team of engineers advance the field of machine translation.” Kites was established in 2015 and the company was co-founded by Dr Alex Waibel and Dr Sebastian Stüker.

The company did not release financial details of the acquisition, but did confirm that Dr Stüker and the rest of the Kites team will remain based in Karlsruhe, Germany. Zoom plans to invest and develop the team there and will even explore the opening of an R&D center in Germany in the future. In its article on the bog, the company mentions that Dr Waibel will become Zoom Research Fellow, a role in which he will advise on the research and development of Zoom machine translation.

Kites started their journey by originally developing classroom translation tools for students who needed help understanding English or German spoken by professors during college classes. The Kites application is now “intuitive, precise and full of advanced features”. It integrates seq2seq technology and predictive AI to enable fast and accurate translation. “The transcription and translated text actually appear before the speaker completes a sentence and / or self-corrects if better interpretation is warranted by more context,” the company says on its website.

Zoom introduced real-time live transcription for all users earlier this year. However, the company on its support page states that “live transcription” only supports English at the moment and recommends users speak clearly for best results. The accuracy of Zoom’s live transcription feature would also depend on many variables such as background noise, volume and clarity of the speaker’s voice, speaker’s fluency in the English language, and specific lexicons and dialects. a geography or a community. Incorporating Kites intelligence will likely improve Zoom’s translation capabilities.

June 30, 2021