Ofir Krakowski, CEO and Co-Founding father of Deepdub – Interview Series

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Ofir Krakowski is the co-founder and CEO of Deepdub. With 30 years of experience in computer science and machine learning, he played a key role in founding and leading the Israeli Air Force’s machine learning and innovation department for 25 years.

Deepdub is an AI-driven dubbing company that leverages deep learning and voice cloning to supply high-quality, scalable localization for film, TV, and digital content. Founded in 2019, it enables content creators to preserve original performances while seamlessly translating dialogue into multiple languages. By integrating AI-powered speech synthesis with human linguistic oversight, Deepdub enhances global content accessibility, reducing the time and price of traditional dubbing. The corporate has gained industry recognition for its innovation, securing major partnerships, certifications, and funding to expand its AI localization technology across the entertainment sector.

What inspired you to found Deepdub in 2019? Was there a selected moment or challenge that led to its creation?

Traditional dubbing has long been the industry standard for localizing content, nevertheless it’s an expensive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process. While AI-generated voice solutions existed, they lacked the emotional depth needed to actually capture an actor’s performance, making them unsuitable for high-quality, complex content.

We identified a chance to bridge this gap by developing an AI-powered localization solution that maintains the emotional authenticity of the unique performance while drastically improving efficiency. We developed our proprietary eTTS™ (Emotion-Text-to-Speech) technology, which ensures that AI-generated voices carry the identical emotional weight, tone, and nuance as human actors.

We envision a world where language and cultural barriers are not any longer obstacles to global content accessibility. In creating our platform, we recognized the challenge of language limitations inside entertainment, e-learning, FAST, and other industries, and got down to revolutionize content localization.

With a purpose to be sure that Deepdub’s solution provided the very best quality localization and dubbing for complex content at scale, we decided to take a hybrid approach and incorporate linguistic and voice experts into the method, at the side of our eTTS™ technology.

Our vision is to democratize voice production, making it massively scalable, universally accessible, inclusive, and culturally relevant.

What were a number of the biggest technical and business challenges you faced when launching Deepdub, and the way did you overcome them?

Gaining the trust of the entertainment industry was a serious hurdle when launching Deepdub. Hollywood has relied on traditional dubbing for a long time, and shifting toward AI-driven solutions required demonstrating our ability to deliver studio-quality leads to an industry often skeptical of AI.

To handle this skepticism, we first enhanced the authenticity of our AI-generated voices by creating a totally licensed voice bank. This bank incorporates real human voice samples, significantly improving the naturalness and expressiveness of our output, which is crucial for acceptance in Hollywood.

Next, we developed proprietary technologies, resembling eTTS™, together with features like Accent Control. These technologies be sure that AI-generated voices not only capture emotional depth and nuances but in addition adhere to the regional authenticity required for high-quality dubbing.

We also built a dedicated in-house post-production team that works closely with our technology. This team fine-tunes the AI outputs, ensuring every bit of content is polished and meets the industry’s high standards.

Moreover, we expanded our approach to incorporate a world network of human experts—voice actors, linguists, and directors from all over the world. These professionals bring invaluable cultural insights and inventive expertise, enhancing the cultural accuracy and emotional resonance of our dubbed content.

Our linguistics team works in tandem with our technology and global experts to make sure the language used is ideal for the target market’s cultural context, further ensuring authenticity and compliance with local norms.

Through these strategies, combining advanced technology with a strong team of worldwide experts and an in-house post-production team, Deepdub has successfully demonstrated to Hollywood and other top-tier production corporations worldwide that AI can significantly enhance traditional dubbing workflows. This integration not only streamlines production but in addition expands possibilities for market expansion.

How does Deepdub’s AI-powered dubbing technology differ from traditional dubbing methods?

Traditional dubbing is labor intensive and a process that may take months per project, because it requires voice actors, sound engineers, and post-production teams to manually recreate dialogue in several languages. Our solution revolutionizes this process by offering a hybrid end-to-end solution – combining technology and human expertise –  integrated directly into post-production workflows, thus reducing localization costs by as much as 70% and turnaround times by as much as 50%.

Unlike other AI-generated voice solutions, our proprietary eTTS™ technology allows for a level of emotional depth, cultural authenticity, and voice consistency that traditional methods struggle to realize at scale.

Are you able to walk us through the hybrid approach Deepdub uses—how do AI and human expertise work together within the dubbing process?

Deepdub’s hybrid model combines the precision and scalability of AI with the creativity and cultural sensitivity of human expertise. Our approach blends the artistry of traditional dubbing with advanced AI technology, ensuring that localized content retains the emotional authenticity and impact of the unique.

Our solution leverages AI to automate the groundwork facets of localization, while human professionals refine the emotional nuances, accents, and cultural details. We incorporate each our proprietary eTTs™ and our Voice-to-Voice (V2V) technologies to boost the natural expressiveness of AI-generated voices, ensuring they capture the depth and realism of human performances. This manner, we be sure that every bit of content feels as real and impactful in its localized form because it does in the unique.

Linguists and voice professionals play a key role on this process, as they enhance the cultural accuracy of AI-generated content. As globalization continues to shape the long run of entertainment, the combination of AI with human artistry will turn out to be the gold standard for content localization.

Moreover, our Voice Artist Royalty Program compensates skilled voice actors every time their voices are utilized in AI-assisted dubbing, ensuring ethical use of voice AI technology.

How does Deepdub’s proprietary eTTS™ (Emotion-Text-to-Speech) technology improve voice authenticity and emotional depth in dubbed content?

Traditional AI-generated voices often lack the subtle emotional cues that make performances compelling. To handle this shortfall, Deepdub developed its proprietary eTTS™ technology, leveraging AI and deep learning models to generate speech that not only retains the complete emotional depth of the unique actor’s performance but in addition integrates human emotional intelligence into the automated process. This advanced capability allows the AI to finely adjust synthesized voices to reflect intended emotions resembling joy, anger, or sadness, resonating authentically with audiences. Moreover, eTTS™ excels in producing high-fidelity voice replication, mimicking natural nuances in human speech resembling pitch, tone, and pace, essential for delivering lines which are real and fascinating. The technology also enhances cultural sensitivity by adeptly adapting outputs to manage accents, ensuring the dubbed content respects and aligns with cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its global appeal and effectiveness.

One in all the common criticisms of AI-generated voices is that they will sound robotic. How does Deepdub be sure that AI-generated voices retain naturalness and emotional nuance?

Our proprietary technology utilizes deep learning and machine learning algorithms to deliver scalable, high-quality dubbing solutions that preserve the unique intent, style, humor, and cultural nuances.

Together with our eTTS™ technology, Deepdub’s modern suite includes features like Voice-to-Voice (V2V), Voice Cloning, Accent Control, and our Vocal Emotion Bank, which permit production teams to fine-tune performances to match their creative vision. These features be sure that every voice carries the emotional depth and nuance mandatory for compelling storytelling and impactful user experiences.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen increasing success of our solutions within the Media & Entertainment industry, so we recently decided to open access to our Hollywood-vetted voiceovers to developers, enterprises, and content creators with our AI Audio API. Powered by our eTTS™ technology, the API enables real-time voice generation with advanced customization parameters, including accent, emotional tone, tempo, and vocal style.

The flagship feature of our API is the audio presets, designed based on years of industry experience with essentially the most requested voiceover needs. These pre-configured settings enable users to rapidly adapt different content types without requiring extensive manual configuration or exploration. Available presents include audio descriptions and audiobooks, documentary or reality narration, drama and entertainment, news delivery, sports commentary, anime or cartoon voiceovers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), in addition to promotional and business content.

AI dubbing involves cultural and linguistic adaptation—how does Deepdub be sure that its dubbing solutions are culturally appropriate and accurate?

Localization isn’t nearly translating words – it’s about translating meaning, intent, and cultural context. Deepdub’s hybrid approach combines AI-driven automation with human linguistic expertise, ensuring that translated dialogue reflects the cultural and emotional nuances of the target market. Our network of localization experts work alongside AI to be sure that dubbed content aligns with regional dialects, expressions, and cultural sensitivities.

What are essentially the most exciting innovations you might be currently working on to push AI dubbing to the subsequent level?

One in all our biggest upcoming innovations is Live/Streaming Dubbing, which can enable real-time dubbing for live broadcasts like sporting events and news media, making global events immediately accessible. By combining this with one other of our exciting innovations, our eTTs™ feature, a proprietary technology that enables for the creation of human-sounding voices from text at a big scale and with full emotional support and business rights in-built, we’re going to find a way to supply prime quality, authentic, emotive, live dubbing unlike anything available on the market.

Take the opening ceremonies of the Olympics or any live sporting event, for instance. While local broadcasters typically provide commentary of their regional language and dialect, this technology will allow viewers from all over the world to experience the complete event of their native language because it unfolds.

Live dubbing will redefine how live events are experienced all over the world, ensuring that language isn’t a barrier.

AI-generated dubbing has faced criticism in certain projects recently. What do you think that are the important thing aspects driving these criticisms?

The important criticisms stem from concerns over authenticity, ethics, and quality. Some AI-generated voices have lacked the emotional resonance and nuance needed for immersive storytelling. At Deepdub, we’ve tackled this by developing emotionally expressive AI voices, ensuring they keep the soul of the unique performance. Deepdub has achieved over 70% exceptional viewer satisfaction across all dimensions, including superb casting, clear dialogue, seamless synchronization, and excellent pacing.

One other issue is the moral use of AI voices. Deepdub is a frontrunner in responsible AI dubbing, pioneering the industry’s first Royalty Program that compensates voice actors for AI-generated performances. We consider AI should enhance human creativity, not replace it, and that commitment is reflected in the whole lot we construct.

How do you see AI dubbing changing the worldwide entertainment industry in the subsequent 5-10 years?

In the subsequent decade, AI-powered dubbing will democratize content like never before, making movies, TV shows, and live broadcasts accessible to each audience, all over the place, of their native language immediately.

We envision a world where streaming platforms and broadcasters integrate real-time multilingual dubbing, removing linguistic barriers and allowing stories to travel further and faster than traditional localization methods have allowed.

Beyond language accessibility, AI dubbing also can enhance media access for the blind and visually impaired. Many depend on audio descriptions to follow visual content, and AI-dubbing allows them to interact with foreign-language content when subtitles aren’t an accessible option. By breaking each linguistic and sensory barriers, AI-powered dubbing will help create a more inclusive entertainment experience for all, which is very critical as latest regulations around media accessibility are coming into effect this yr worldwide.

What are a number of the biggest challenges that also should be solved for AI dubbing to turn out to be truly mainstream?

The most important challenges are maintaining ultra-high quality at scale, ensuring cultural and linguistic precision, and establishing ethical guidelines for AI-generated voices. Nevertheless, beyond the technical hurdles, public acceptance of AI dubbing is dependent upon trust. Viewers must feel that AI-generated voices preserve the authenticity and emotional depth of performances fairly than sounding synthetic or detached.

For AI dubbing to be fully embraced, it should be prime quality by combining human artistry and technology at scale and likewise show respect for creative integrity, linguistic nuance, and cultural context. This implies ensuring that voices remain true to the unique actors’ intent, avoiding inaccuracies that would alienate audiences, and addressing ethical concerns around deepfake risks and voice ownership.

As AI dubbing becomes more widespread, technology providers must implement rigorous standards for voice authenticity, security, and mental property protection. Deepdub is actively leading the charge in these areas, ensuring that AI voice technology enhances global storytelling while respecting the artistic and skilled contributions of human talent. Only then will audiences, content creators, and industry stakeholders fully embrace AI dubbing as a trusted and priceless tool.

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