SlatorPod

EXPLORE

Society & Culture

© 2024 PodJoint

https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts211/v4/1a/bb/40/1abb40e1-24f5-310c-811e-515fcca1b68e/mza_18086258398222807833.jpg/600x600bb.jpg

SlatorPod

Slator

274 episodes

2 weeks ago

In the 2025 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond reflect on a year defined by rapid AI investment, shifting policy, and structural change across the language industry. Esther opens the year-in-review by highlighting January’s twin funding milestones in the language AI and product space. Florian follows with February, which saw hyperscalers and AI labs release data highly relevant to the way AI translation is being used. March, April, and May saw major developments...

Show more...

All content for SlatorPod is the property of Slator and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

In the 2025 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond reflect on a year defined by rapid AI investment, shifting policy, and structural change across the language industry. Esther opens the year-in-review by highlighting January’s twin funding milestones in the language AI and product space. Florian follows with February, which saw hyperscalers and AI labs release data highly relevant to the way AI translation is being used. March, April, and May saw major developments...

Show more...

Episodes (20/274)

SlatorPod

2025 Recap and 2026 Predictions!

In the 2025 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond reflect on a year defined by rapid AI investment, shifting policy, and structural change across the language industry. Esther opens the year-in-review by highlighting January’s twin funding milestones in the language AI and product space. Florian follows with February, which saw hyperscalers and AI labs release data highly relevant to the way AI translation is being used. March, April, and May saw major developments...

2 weeks ago

31 minutes

SlatorPod

#273 A Big New Market for Dubbing and Accessibility Solutions with 3Play Media co-CEOs

Josh Miller and Christopher Antunes, Co-Founders and co-CEOs of 3Play Media, join SlatorPod to talk about the company’s trajectory as a leading language solutions integrator (LSI) in multilingual video accessibility. The duo explains how the two met at MIT, where an early challenge from OpenCourseWare revealed that captioning thousands of technical videos was financially impossible, leading to the company’s founding, where they developed proprietary tooling, leveraged AI, and incorporated exp...

3 weeks ago

51 minutes

SlatorPod

#272 Spatial Audio, IMDb Honors Dubs, Kindle AI Translations, Startup Rounds

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, reflecting on SlatorCon Remote and announcing that SlatorCon London 2026 is open for registration. The duo touch on IMDb’s decision to recognize dubbing artists as part of new professional credit categories, explaining how this expands visibility for multilingual voice talent. They then move on to Coursera’s strategy shift and outline how its new CEO is betting on AI translation and AI dubbing to revive slowing growt...

4 weeks ago

27 minutes

SlatorPod

#271 How aiOla Turns Natural, Multilingual Speech into Workflow-Ready Data

Amir Haramaty, Co-Founder and President of aiOla, joins SlatorPod to talk about how spoken, multilingual data can transform enterprise workflows and unlock real ROI. The Co-Founder introduces himself not as a serial entrepreneur but as a serial problem solver, focused on one core challenge: most enterprise data remains uncaptured, unstructured, and unused. Amir emphasizes that traditional speech tech fails in real-world conditions, where accents, noise, and hyper-specific jargon dominate. He ...

1 month ago

35 minutes

SlatorPod

#270 AI Translation State of the Art with Tom Kocmi and Alon Lavie

Tom Kocmi, Researcher at Cohere, and Alon Lavie, Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, join Florian and Slator language AI Research Analyst, Maria Stasimioti, on SlatorPod to talk about the state-of-the-art in AI translation and what the latest WMT25 results reveal about progress and remaining challenges. Tom outlines how the WMT conference has become a crucial annual benchmark for assessing AI translation quality and ensuring systems are tested on fresh, demanding dat...

1 month ago

53 minutes

SlatorPod

#269 Milestone Localization Founder on Automated Glossaries, LSI Leadership, AI Fatigue

Nikita Agarwal, Founder of Milestone Localization, joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey founding a language solutions integrator (LSI) and launching Cavya.ai, a platform designed to streamline translation project preparation. Nikita began Milestone Localization in 2020 after discovering the language industry while working in international sales. She was drawn to the field’s global scope and low barrier to entry. She emphasizes that sales experience played a crucial role in landing early ...

1 month ago

30 minutes

SlatorPod

#268 Thordur Arnason on Why Capgemini Is Building an AI Speech Translator

Thordur Arnason, Global AI GTM Lead at Capgemini Invent, joins SlatorPod to talk about how the consulting giant is embracing language AI through BabelSpeak, its new real-time AI speech translation platform. Thordur explains that the idea emerged from Capgemini’s AI Futures Lab while researching multimodal AI. Inspired by Meta’s launch of the Seamless M4T model, the team set out to tackle the hard problem of live AI speech translation. He notes that early pilots with DNB Bank, the Norwegian Re...

1 month ago

32 minutes

SlatorPod

Bizarre AI Research, Perplexity Ad Blunder, New RWS Hires

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with congratulations to Villam Language Services on its sale to InAnyLanguage. Slator served as joint exclusive advisor with Maveria Advisory, representing Villam throughout the end-to-end M&A process. The duo turns to Perplexity’s Localization Manager job posting, which they found almost identical to OpenAI’s earlier post, down to matching structure, order, and phrasing. They question whether copying such a specific ad sh...

2 months ago

24 minutes

SlatorPod

#266 CaptionHub CEO Tom Bridges on AI-Powered Real-Time Media Accessibility

Tom Bridges, CEO and Founder of CaptionHub, joins SlatorPod to talk about how a small in-house tool evolved into a global AI-powered multimedia localization platform. Tom began his career in post-production and visual effects before stumbling into subtitling when a client needed to localize a video into 16 languages overnight. He reveals that the disorganized workflows relying on spreadsheets inspired him to create a more efficient, centralized solution, which became CaptionHub. Tom exp...

2 months ago

33 minutes

SlatorPod

#265 Slator Award, DeepL’s $5 Billion Plan, Merz Stirs EU Interpreter Debate

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with breaking news that DeepL is reportedly exploring an initial public offering (IPO) in the US at a potential USD 5bn valuation. This comes as DeepL now positions itself as a “global AI product and research company”. Florian also notes the launch of DeepL Marketplace and the appointment of Gonçalo Gaiolas as Chief Product Officer. Florian opens with the first-ever Slator Award at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, w...

3 months ago

34 minutes

SlatorPod

#264 ElevenLabs Surprise, ChatGPT Stunner, YouTube Dubs, Microsoft Interpreting API

Slator’s Senior Research Analyst Alex Edwards joins Esther and Florian on the pod to discuss ElevenLabs’ move from a pure-play language technology platform (LTP) to becoming a language solutions integrator (LSI) by adding a managed service offering. He outlines that the LSI will now offer managed services such as dubbing, transcription, and subtitling, hiring in-house linguists and vendor managers, while charging about USD 22 per minute for dubbing. Florian then turns to YouTube’s rollout of ...

3 months ago

34 minutes

SlatorPod

#263 SlatorCon Recap, Cohere’s Big AI Translation Launch, TransPerfect Buys Unbabel

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, beginning with a recap of SlatorCon Silicon Valley 2025, where the duo noted strong localization buyer and user turnout, and tech-focused discussions across presentations and panels. One key highlight was Cohere’s well-timed launch of Command A Translate, which allowed Kelly Marchisio to share details on building multilingual LLMs. Esther notes that Cohere’s multilingual models focus on high-quality coverage of about...

3 months ago

32 minutes

SlatorPod

#262 The Hard Facts About AI in Healthcare Interpreting with GLOBO CEO Dipak Patel

Dipak Patel, CEO of GLOBO, joins SlatorPod to talk about his journey into language services and the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into healthcare communication. Dipak explains that his career began in consulting and private equity, but a personal experience with his mother’s healthcare highlighted the importance of interpretation services and led him to GLOBO. The CEO emphasizes that since 2020, GLOBO has doubled down on healthcare, embraced AI and large language models, and ...

4 months ago

39 minutes

SlatorPod

#261 Finding Product-Market Fit in Language AI with Naitiv Founder Gayatri Shahane

Gayatri Shahane, Founder and CEO of early-stage startup Naitiv, joins SlatorPod to talk about her entrepreneurial journey and building a conversational AI tool for business communication. Gayatri describes how Naitiv’s conversational AI agent is built as a desktop app to manage latency and audio challenges in live interpretation. She explains that it supports different conversation modes for casual and professional contexts, with a voice orchestration engine developed to handle turn-taking, s...

4 months ago

26 minutes

SlatorPod

#260 Pairaphrase Co-Founder Rick Woyde on Building a Language Technology Platform

Rick Woyde, Co-Founder of Pairaphrase, joins SlatorPod to talk about his entrepreneurial journey co-founding a language technology platform (LTP) focused on simplicity and accessibility. Rick describes identifying early adoption of Google Translate among businesses and spotting a gap for a platform that served both non-technical users and professionals without the complexity of traditional LTP tools. The Co-Founder highlights that Pairaphrase now serves diverse clients, from US schools transl...

4 months ago

33 minutes

SlatorPod

#259 What Microsoft’s Misunderstood Copilot Study Actually Means for the Language Industry

Slator’s Head of Research Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss Microsoft’s research paper “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI”, a study that stirred significant debate across social media. The paper, based on 200,000 anonymized Microsoft Copilot interactions, aims to understand what tasks people ask AI to perform and how effectively those tasks are completed. Pairing this with the US O*NET database of occupational tasks, researchers created a...

4 months ago

23 minutes

SlatorPod

#258 Outdoor and Action Sports as a Growth Market for Localization with Martina Russo

Martina Russo, CEO of The Action Sports Translator (TAST), joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey from being a multilingual outdoor sports enthusiast to leading a language solutions integrator dedicated exclusively to action and outdoor sports. Martina describes how each action sport has unique subcultures and terminology, from mountain biking’s multiple disciplines to climbing’s variety of techniques and jargon. Even within the same sport, regional language differences present challenges....

5 months ago

34 minutes

SlatorPod

#257 The 50 Top Language AI Startups of 2025

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, including the newly released Slator 2025 Language AI 50 Under 50, showcasing fifty of the most innovative and fast-growing language AI startups founded within the past fifty months. The duo explain how Slator sifted through hundreds of companies, assessing innovation, practical solutions to real buyer problems, and strong market positioning. The final fifty span five categories: multilingual video and audio, live speech transl...

5 months ago

29 minutes

SlatorPod

#256 YouTube Dub Fail, Propio Buys CyraCom, LSIs Cheer Scale AI Deal

Florian and Esther catch up on a few weeks’ worth of language industry news with a surge of developments in speech translation. Apple’s on-device translation debuts in apps like iMessage and FaceTime, and OpenAI enhances ChatGPT‘s Advanced Voice Mode with more human-like interactions and real-time translation. Florian unpacks YouTube’s broad rollout of AI dubbing for 80 million creators in 20 languages, where he trials German and finds robotic voices, bad translations, and no editing options,...

6 months ago

31 minutes

SlatorPod

#255 The Rise of Voice Productivity with Krisp CEO Davit Baghdasaryan

Davit Baghdasaryan, Co-Founder & CEO of Krisp, joins SlatorPod to talk about the platform’s journey from a noise cancellation tool to a comprehensive voice productivity solution. Originally built to eliminate background noise during calls, Krisp has expanded into real-time accent conversion, speech translation, agent assistance, and note-taking — technologies being rapidly adopted in enterprise environments. The company’s accent conversion is now deployed by tens of thousands of call cent...

6 months ago

36 minutes