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The media industry is being “revolutionized” with artificial intelligence (AI) in many ways and that extends to the benefits the technology provides in content localization and dubbing, according to Amsterdam-based AI startup Dubformer.

The company is able to deliver “broadcast-level quality dubbing and voice-over services” to the media industry, it  says, noting It leverages “unique in-house technology, pairing it with human curation.”

As of now, Dubformer supports more than 70 languages in over 1,000 voices, it says.

During the Feb. 27 webinar, “Decoding Success: AI Dubbing’s Role in Media & Entertainment — Benefits and Real Customer Cases Revealed,” Dimitri Konovalov, CBDO at Dubformer, and Irina Divnogortseva, the company’s head of media, provided an in-depth exploration of their services, featuring real customer use cases (including FAST, YouTube and PayTV).

The main topics they touched on were: What is AI-powered dubbing; what types of content does it apply to and where to use it; what are the benefits of AI dubbing are by optimizing the costs and growing your localized content library; and how AI can help a media company monetize content.

Noting that he came from the tech world, Konovalov said he had been working with technology for more than 15 years, helping large and small organizations “bring different kinds of innovation to the market.”

Now the technology that everybody is talking about is AI, he noted. “Before that, it was machine learning. A long time ago, it was data science. And even though all of these are very different technologies and different approaches, they have something in common…. All of them, even though they were quite young, they managed to bring real value and real innovation to the businesses around the world, and some of them, for example some of the machine learning models, are now helping businesses significantly.”

Konovalov is “really excited to see how that will be happening with artificial intelligence in the media  and entertainment space,” he said.

AI-powered dubbing is the “core business” for Dubformer now, he said.

The Dubformer team came together two years ago, Divnogortseva said, noting: “In that moment, we understood that AI can bring some benefit to the market. And we started from there.  Then, from case by case, we understood … the real power of performer-cost optimization” and how it could change the industry.

The company can also “easily provide AI-powered subtitles,” she pointed out. It can also handle “content localization from 18 source languages to 70-plus.”

Dubformer used the term powered for a reason because, “even though the services that we provide, they’re indeed powered by AI, there is also a human element to them,” he said.

They went on to demonstrate their company’s AI-powered dubbing by showing a scene from the classic comedy film His Girl Friday first in English, as it was made, and then the same scene with German dubbing.

In that case, Konovalov, said, “as an input, we had only the English video – we didn’t have the script; we didn’t have the music and effects file.”

In a case like this, he explained, Dubformer’s AI “creates the script, then it translates the script and does the adaptation.” There is also a “proofreading element,” voicing done by AI, proof listening done by humans and then, finally,” comes the mixing,“ he said, adding: “We act as a language source provider for you. We take care of the inputs that you provide, we take care of the quality, and we deliver the final output that you can just use straight away.”