#174 Dotsub Collapses, Microsoft Delights, ChatGPT Traffic Peaks, EU Chooses MT

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news over the past month, with ChatGPT traffic hitting its peak in May 2023 and large language models being released left, right, and center. The EU Commission (EC) unveiled the launch of a pilot program that will see the EC use its own machine translation tool to translate certain press releases. In mid-June, media localization company Dotsub announced it had ceased operations, due to its current liquidity situation. In more positive news, Microsoft's beloved Language Portal has made a comeback after the company announced that it would be shut down at the end of June. Over in M&A, XL8 has acquired AHT to diversify and grow its customer base to US government agencies. Also branching out is RWS as it bought legal and legislative content management system Propylon for a total purchase price of USD 47.3m.Meanwhile, in funding, Czech localization startup Localazy announced at the end of June that they raised EUR 1m. Voice generation platform, Eleven Labs, announced it had raised USD 19m in a Series A round.