#77 Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli on Personalized Video in 40+ Languages

Synthesia CEO and Co-founder Victor Riparbelli joins SlatorPod to discuss the company’s approach to operating and developing the world’s first and largest platform for video AI generation.Victor talks about Synthesia’s journey and the rapid progression of media technology. He unpacks the role of academia in the company, where PhDs and professors make up nearly 50% of staff.The CEO goes over the evolution of text-to-speech in the last decade. He also discusses the difficulty of extending voice into multiple languages when there is no data to support the neural network.Victor reviews the success of video content over text and how this ties into working with global companies. He shares how he sees the localization and translation industries as partners and an integral part of creating multilingual content.Victor talks about Synthesia’s funding rounds and shares the story behind connecting with their first investor Mark Cuban. The podcast wraps up with Victor’s view on deepfakes and the company’s vision of creating more storytelling rather than informative content.First up, Florian and Esther go through the poll results from May 21, where respondents weighed in on Translation as a Subscription, with only 12% thinking of it as “the future.” Florian talks about KUDO’s latest public relations win as billionaire investor Bill Ackman tweeted about using the multilingual conferencing platform for an investor presentation.For the third week in a row, RWS pops up in language industry news as it partners with speech recognition system CEDAT85 to launch a live subtitling and captioning solution for online meetings and events. Florian discusses SwissText’s 2021 conference competition, which saw Microsoft’s winning approach toward the recognition and translation of the Swiss-German dialect into standard German text.