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Zoom has announced that it’s acquiring a company known as Kites (short for Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), which has worked on creating real-time translation and transcription software. Zoom says the acquisition is a move to help it make communicating with people who speak different languages easier, and that it’s looking to add translation capabilities to its video conferencing app.
According to its site, Kites began at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and its technology was originally developed to act as in-classroom translation for students who needed help understanding the English or German their professors were lecturing in.
Zoom already has real-time transcriptions, but it’s limited to people who are talking in English.
On a support page, Zoom also makes it clear that its current live transcription feature may not meet certain accuracy requirements. The company says it’s considering opening a research center in Germany, where the Kites team will be staying."
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Zoom Kites Acquisition Buyout Live Transcription Real Time Machine Translation Company
Kites was established in 2015 by co-founders Dr. Alex Waibel and Dr. Sebastian Stüker.
Zoom has acquired a real-time machine translation company named Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – Kites. The company looks to leverage Kites resources to improve meeting productivity and efficiency on Zoom by providing real-time multi-language translation capabilities for users. Zoom says that "Kites' talented team of 12 research scientists will help its engineering team 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 has not released the financial details of the acquisition, but has confirmed that Dr. Stüker and the rest of the Kites team will remain based in Karlsruhe, Germany. Zoom plans to invest and grow the team there and will even explore the opening of an R&D center in Germany sometime in the future. In its bog post, the company mentions that Dr. Waibel will become a Zoom Research Fellow, a role in which he will advise on Zoom's machine translation research and development.
Kites began its journey originally developing classroom translation tools for students who needed help understanding English or German spoken by professors during university lectures. The Kites app is said to now be "intuitive, accurate and full of advanced functionality." It integrates seq2seq technology and predictive AI to allow fast and accurate translation. “Transcript and translated text in fact appear before the speaker completes a sentence, and/or self-corrects if a better interpretation is warranted by further 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 says that ‘live transcription' only supports English for now and it recommends users to speak clearly for best results. The accuracy of Zoom's live transcription feature is also said to depend on many variables like background noise, volume and clarity of the speaker's voice, speaker's proficiency with the English language, and lexicons and dialects specific to a geography or community. The integration of Kites intelligence will likely improve Zoom's capabilities in translation.
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Zoom adding automatic closed captioning for all free accounts
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Zoom plans to roll out support for automatic closed captioning to free accounts this fall as part of its efforts to make the service more accessible, the company has announced. If you’re a free account holder who needs access to the feature before then, Zoom is allowing users to manually request access to the Live Transcription feature via a Google Form linked to in its announcement.
Automatic transcriptions aren’t an entirely new Zoom feature. The service has previously offered AI-powered live transcription for all its paid accounts. Otherwise, meeting hosts have had to manually add their own captions, or use a third-party service. But now the feature will become available to the millions of people that rely on Zoom’s services for free. A Zoom support page notes that its Live Transcription feature is currently only available in English.
Automatic closed captions are also available with other video conferencing services like Google Meet. Given how widely used Zoom has become since the start of the pandemic, however, it’s great to see it adding more accessibility features. Previous efforts to make Zoom more accessible have included allowing meetings to pin and spotlight interpreters on a call, as well as adding screen reader support.
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