Zoom buys German AI translation company

The deal will expand the app’s speech-to-text feature, one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence research.

July 02, 2021 12:06 pm | Updated 03:28 pm IST

Zoom currently provides live transcriptions but is limited to the English language.

Zoom currently provides live transcriptions but is limited to the English language.

Video-conferencing app Zoom said it has bought German machine learning translation solutions company Kites for an undisclosed amount, to provide efficient cross-language translations to users during video calls.

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The acquisition will help Zoom advance the field of machine translation to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multi-language translation capabilities to users, Zoom said in a statement.

The company did not provide details of the deal.

Kites was founded in 2015 by faculty members of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, originally designed to facilitate communication within international teams in an academic setting.

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Zoom currently provides live transcriptions but is limited to the English language. The deal will expand the app’s speech-to-text feature, one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence research, according to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

The deal also marks Zoom’s second-ever acquisition. The company bought end-to-end encryption solutions company Keybase for an undisclosed amount in May last year.

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