SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 11, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Startup EzDubs announced today that it has raised a $4.2M seed round to transform speech tech with AI, and launched its flagship solution out of beta: the first and only app that translates calls into other languages as you’re speaking, preserving your voice and emotions. Much like Star Trek's Universal Translator, EzDubs enables people who don't speak each other's languages to communicate by voice live and remotely - like cross-lingual couples, those managing offshore staff, and immigrants and their support teams.
The previously unannounced funding round was led by Rahul Garg and Neeraj Arora during their tenure at Venture Highway. Other participants in the round were Y Combinator and well-known angels including Jared Friedman (Y Combinator), Amjad Masad and Michele Catasta (Replit), Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition) and Ben Firshman (Replicate).
EzDubs is based on a proprietary real-time speech translation model that mirrors a person’s voice, emotion, and cadence in real-time.
The company was founded by three engineers with deep experience in speech tech. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy and Amrutavarsh Kinagi met at college in Hong Kong and were impacted by protests in the city in 2019. Local news and government updates were in Cantonese only, and they felt vulnerable because they didn't speak or read the language well. The two were already researching novel deep learning architectures for speech recognition, and this challenge sparked an idea: to make Star Trek's Universal Translator a reality.
After moving to the U.S. to attend Columbia University, the two continued working on their idea, eventually bringing on third co-founder Kareem Nassar, who had led Cisco's Speech AI group. Nassar declined to hire Krishnamurthy full-time after he interned at Cisco, instead telling him, "You and Amrut are starting a company and I'll be your first investor." Nassar eventually joined as co-founder and CTO.
"This is the first step in EzDubs’ mission to break down language barriers in communication and expand the world’s social graph by enabling multilingual connections to form and grow," said Krishnamurthy, co-founder and co-CEO of EzDubs." EzDubs believes there is a latent demand for speaking in different languages, and eventually this will enable a multilingual social network that hasn’t yet been built."
Arora said, "The EzDubs team’s vision is to make multilingual communication so ubiquitous that language is no longer a barrier to migrating to new countries. This is a highly disruptive technology breakthrough - we were amazed when we saw it."
"Expression is core to our existence. The ability to communicate with others plays a foundational role in shaping our lives and societies," said Garg. "EzDubs is enabling a giant leap in global human interactions and we are really excited to be part of this journey."
While a human translator or off-the-shelf LLMs like ChatGPT must wait until a sentence is finished, EzDubs can translate in real time while a person is speaking. This eliminates any pauses and lets the conversation flow naturally. Unlike other translation apps, EzDubs' speech synthesis model can clone voices in real time with no previous training. It can mirror sarcasm, anger and other emotions, adapting as the call progresses - this fidelity to the emotion and cadence of the original speaker is critical for good relationship building. When using EzDubs, it feels like the person you’re speaking to has learned your language.
"EzDubs is an enormous step forward in AI speech technology," said Krishnamurthy, "and there's so much more to come."
Watch a demo of EzDubs live translation capabilities here, and download the EzDubs app at the App Store, Play Store or EzDubs.ai.
About EzDubs
EzDubs has made Star Trek’s Universal Translator a reality, with the first and only app that translates calls into other languages as you’re speaking, preserving your voice and emotions. Designed for people who don't speak each other's languages but need to communicate by voice remotely - like cross lingual couples, those managing offshore staff, immigrants and their support teams, and a multitude of latent translation uses that are widespread but not mainstream - the free EzDubs app translates instantly without waiting for a sentence to complete, allowing for natural free-form conversations without any pauses. VC backed, EzDubs has raised $4.2M to transform speech technology with AI. Download the app at the App Store, Play Store or EzDubs.ai.
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Michelle Faulkner
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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/152a72d7-ab51-44ff-89ab-fc9f2da4b155
