Below is our recent interview with Eugen von Rubinberg and Alexander Konovalov, the Founders of Vidby:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Our company was founded in September 2021 in Rotkreuz, Switzerland. In total, our team consists of 25 people. The development team is located in Ukraine, and all other activities (sales, marketing, and actual office) are located in Switzerland in the canton of Zug. It so happened that our team has extensive experience in speech technologies. Our first product was Drotr – Droid Translator – the world’s first video call service with real-time translations. But since messengers require large investments, this is a lot of money, we temporarily suspended support for the Drotr messenger, and made a turn towards the B2B model, namely the translation of video files. That is, our service is designed for people and companies that can increase their income from video distribution by translating videos into new languages.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: Our product is on the market, ready, but as in any innovative product, we have a large supply of ideas and a large backlog of tasks, we are constantly improving and refining our service. Recent updates include cutting out the original speech from the original audio file using artificial intelligence technologies, that is, so that only the music remains in the file. This greatly improves the user experience. We also have such options for working with original sound as: – automatic audio mixing, the original will be muted – the ability to upload your music file without speech – get as a result of dubbing only a file with a new speech. That is all possible options.
Also, we have now added our web-based translation editor, where you can manage accents. Despite the fact that errors in our translation are practically eliminated (our translation accuracy is up to 99%), the translation editor is convenient to use to manage stress in words, if necessary, as well as, if necessary, make some corrections to the target text, if the client wants it. This is especially true when dealing with unique names and when you want the word to be pronounced correctly in each language.
Also a useful feature for many users – now you can download subtitles in each new language in SRT format. This is very brief, because a lot of work on improving the service is done in such a way that it is not visible to the client outwardly.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: The essence of our service is the translation and dubbing of video and audio files into 70+ languages. The peculiarity is that all processes (recognition, translation, dubbing, sound editing) can be done automatically. It will be very fast (1 minute wait for 1 minute of video) and will be around 80% accurate. That is, the general meaning will be clear, but there will be errors. Such a scenario is very convenient if you just need to understand or convey the general meaning of what was said, or select the necessary fragments in a very long video. This service costs only 0.9 per minute of new video.
The second option allows you to achieve an accuracy of 99% (more often it is 100%, but we still speak modestly – 99%, since there may be minor inaccuracies). This is achieved by ordering an additional service of post-editing by a human of the result of automatic speech recognition in our special web editor. Our web-based transcript editor has a number of unique features that allow you not only to edit the transcript (as some competitors do), but through the introduction of special functions to achieve such high accuracy that virtually no one else on the market can provide.
An important feature of our service is also a simple and convenient order form. The order itself in our service takes approximately 1 minute. If someone has ever ordered or tried to order a translation from translation agencies, he is well aware of how much this process takes time, effort and nerves, not counting the high cost and long terms.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: In the next 6 months we want to enter the US market. The video and audio transcription market alone is over $30 billion a year and over 90% of that amount is in the US market. And speech transcription is only 25-30% of the capabilities of our service. We are also considering options for starting cooperation with major strategic partners, which we will talk about in separate messages, negotiations are already underway. And also this year we want to launch some new very interesting features that will open new horizons for our company and our customers.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Translation accuracy, 99%. We recommend that you watch video examples on our website or order your own video to make sure of this. We think that we have the best combination of simplicity-price-speed-quality of translation. But there is a clear belief in the market (and this is indeed not without reason) that automatic translation is something terrible and cannot be accurate. Everyone who tried to make such services and tried to use the cloud services of large global companies is delighted with our quality, because we also use the services of such companies in our work. We recently received a grant from Google Cloud and got verified by them. We are grateful to Google for its great contribution to the development of speech technologies, for helping us. And we are glad that with our experience and knowledge we can improve the quality of work even of their services. How do we do it and why? Because we live by these processes, we are focused on results and we ourselves are consumers of what we produce.