Content solutions company RWS has acquired the intellectual property behind Papercup’s AI dubbing technology.
Papercup’s tech had built up a reputation for its ability to faithfully reproduce a speaker’s tone, pace and emotion.
The acquisition is part of RWS’s plans to accelerate its ability to offer clients multilingual video, voice and content localisation across multiple formats and channels.
Papercup’s technology combines state-of-the-art voice synthesis, thousands of unique AI voices and editorial tools for human language specialists to fine-tune the output. It offers control and quality output comparable to human dubbing by actors and artists, says RWS.
Last month, a large portion of the Papercup team left the company to join Scale AI, leaving the future of the Papercup technology in doubt. The RWS acquisition sees it given a future once more.
“The acquisition of Papercup’s market-leading technology marks our intention to transform all forms of enterprise content, making it easier for businesses to connect to global audiences,” said Ben Faes, CEO of RWS. “Integrating this hybrid AI capability into our own solutions perfectly aligns with the demand for scale and quality in this exploding multimedia space.”
Like Papercup before, RWS has “humans in the loop” to ensure correct tone, pacing and accuracy.
The company has 1,800 in-house linguists and a global network of over 40,000 language experts, and, through its acquisition of Papercup’s tech, it says enterprise clients can “expect to unlock new value from video content that was once too expensive or complex to localise - from corporate communications and training to marketing and social media-related content.”
Papercup’s technology will now sit alongside RWS’s existing suite of language technologies, including Language Weaver for neural machine translation and the Trados platform.
No comments yet