Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Head of Research Anna Wyndham joining to give a breakdown of the 2024 Slator Language AI 50 Under 50, a list highlighting 50 of the newest and most notable language AI companies.
The list focuses on 50 language AI companies under 50 months old, showcasing their innovations in speech-to-text, machine translation, speech synthesis, and more.
Esther talks about Disney's Accelerator Program, which invested in two language AI startups: ElevenLabs and AudioShake. AudioShake uses AI to parse audio tracks for mixing or dubbing and ElevenLabs, a multilingual AI voice startup, recently raised USD 80m.
Florian mentions AnthropicAI's new language model, Claude 3 Opus, and shared a user's experience testing it for translating a low-resource language (Circassian) with impressive results. (note: a few hours after the podcast production was finished, the user gave an update that the model was trained on Circassian).
Florian briefly touches on Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, with translation getting a shoutout as a key early use case for large language models.
Esther provides an overview of Honyaku Center's financial results for Q3 2024, where overall revenues saw a 3% growth and translation remained the primary revenue driver.
Esther shares news about recent layoffs at Sega of America, affecting 61 temp workers from quality assurance and localization.