Jesse Shemen, co-founder and CEO of Papercup, spoke to ttvnews about the company’s innovative dubbing technology, which uses artificial intelligence and synthetic voices to make dubbing more affordable and accessible to more content distributors and creators.
As digital platforms and networks continue to expand across the globe, having content that can travel internationally is increasingly becoming more and more important for creators and distributors. In this scenario, content dubbing and translating is a mandatory tool for that content to be able to connect with audiences worldwide.
The only problem is content localization is often a complicated process which involves many professionals and talents, making it an expensive tool that not all content providers can afford.
That’s where Papercup comes in, offering “a faster, more affordable way to go global with existing video content using AI dubbing”.
“At Papercup, it’s very simple what we do. We realized that dubbing is very expensive and time consuming, and it requires a lot of people. And not everyone can justify dubbing and end up getting the content stuck in one language”, said Jesse Shemen, co-founder and CEO of Papercup, who spoke to ttvnews at the last edition of Content Americas in Miami.
“So what we introduced is called AI dubbing, where we use Artificial Intelligence and synthetic voices to translate and dub content so that people can watch it in their own native language”, he added.
This way, AI becomes a perfect partner for human talent and the result is the company is able “to make dubbing more accessible to the whole market rather to people who have higher budgets”, he explained.
So how does Papercup make it so that the voices don’t sound fake and too artificial? Through their own custom AI: “We developed the AI and we create the voices ourselves, so they can sound human-like and expressive, and very relevant to the actual content”.
“Because if you just take Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri, and you put that on a video, it doesn’t work. We had to create our own voices which we use through our own AI to generate synthetic voices that not only sound human, but also sound emotive enough so that they can be used for actual content”, he added.
Through this innovative technology, the company works with a wide selection of clients, helping them globalize their content to reach mass audiences in different languages. “We have different types of clients. In the digital media space, there’s partners like Bloomberg or Jamie Oliver; we work with Sky or Business Insider, which we helped last year reach over 300 million people alone on Facebook and YouTube with videos that we translated with our synthetic voices”.
“So we do a lot of work in that space and now we do a lot of work in the FAST space. A lot of the FAST platforms want to build up their libraries and catalogs, but it’s too expensive to dub hundreds of hours of content using human-based methods. So we use this combination of humans and AI to make that more economical, faster and cheaper”, he explained.
Papercup was present at Content Americas, where attendees showed a need for content localization. “We’ve been asked to come and we have a lot of demand”, the CEO explained. “Everyone wants to buy content, distribute content and reach more people. If you produce in the language that people want, great. But if not, you need a tool that will allow you to buy more content, distribute more, and effective scalable dubbing allows you to do that”, he concluded.
