IMAX Partners with CAMB.AI for AI-Powered Content Localization

IMAX Partners with CAMB.AI for AI-Powered Content Localisation Services

The collaboration will bring IMAX's immersive content to a wider, non-English speaking audience. Global entertainment technology and cinematic experience company IMAX will use content localisation services from CAMB.AI, an India-based AI translation and speech emulation company, to deliver an enhanced entertainment experience and cater to a larger audience. CAMB.AI announced a partnership with IMAX on November 27 to provide these services, where CAMB.AI will utilise its DubStudio platform to perform content localisation on IMAX original content, including IMAX documentaries, into multiple languages. Also Read: Nvidia Unveils New AI Model Fugatto That Generates Audio from Text and Audio Using the platform, CAMB.AI will enhance IMAX's global reach by translating and emulating speech in multiple languages while preserving the original tone, emotion, and prosody of the speakers. According to the company, DubStudio uses CAMB.AI's proprietary models, BOLI (for translation) and MARS (for speech emulation), to create authentic vocal performances that retain the prosody, emotion, and tone of the original speaker. CAMB.AI said IMAX, known for its immersive cinematic experiences, agreed to use its products after extensive testing and review of IMAX content, which promises to offer audiences a richer, more personalised viewing experience in their native languages. CAMB.AI CEO Avneesh Prakash explained, "CAMB.AI is confident it will change how Hollywood entertainment is watched around the world and provide a richer, more immersive viewing experience for non-English speakers." "We are pleased to have the support of CAMB.AI as we look to serve our audiences around the world with original, IMAX-exclusive events and experiences," said Mark Welton, Global President, IMAX Theatres. IMAX says it continues to diversify its global content portfolio with experiences and events across movies, documentaries, music, gaming, and sports, including IMAX original content. Also Read: Deutsche Telekom Turns Anonymised Network Data into Music with AI Established in 2022, CAMB.AI is a speech AI company that specialises in instantaneously dubbing any performance in over 100 languages, dialects, and accents using the original voices with their nuances. The company says its technology doesn't just translate speech, but captures and conveys the speaker's original tone and nuance, preserving emotion. This ensures that the translated content remains as powerful and engaging as the original, maintaining the speaker's intended impact.

IMAX Might Use AI to Translate Original Content in Real Time

Camb.AI will reportedly translate IMAX content into 140 languages IMAX, the Canadian production theatre company, reportedly announced its partnership with Dubai-based Camb.AI to offer its content in localised languages globally. On Monday, the company reportedly announced that it will be leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) tools to translate its original content into 140 languages to let viewers enjoy it in their local languages. Notably, the technology will only be introduced to the IMAX branded theatres, as per the report. It is believed that IMAX is targeting the rising popularity of non-English content worldwide with this move. According to a TechCrunch report, the production theatre company has joined hands with Camb.AI, an AI firm which specialises in speech models. With this collaboration, IMAX is reportedly planning to release its entire content library in localised content globally. From a strategic perspective, the company is said to be targeting the rising popularity of South Korean, Indonesian, and other Southeast Asian content in Western countries and the rest of the world. While such content is available with subtitles on various platforms, dubbed content is less available due to its higher cost of production. However, AI-powered dubbing has not been used at a large scale so far. IMAX, on the other hand, is planning to offer real-time AI voice translations in theatres globally. This means theatres in every country will get the company's original content in their native languages. The report did not specify how IMAX will tackle the challenge of showing content in regions with multiple local languages, such as India. Camb.AI has reportedly deployed its AI dubbing and speech translations for live sports events such as the Australian Open, Eurovision Sport, and Major League Soccer. It uses the Boli model which specialises in speech-to-text translation, and Mars which performs speech emulation. Both of the models are part of the AI firm's DubStudio platform which supports 140 languages. Akshat Prakash, the Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Camb.AI told TechCrunch that, unlike companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is not trying to horizontally expand its AI tech stack and instead is focusing on vertically enhancing its offerings. The executive also highlighted that some of its large language models (LLMs) have less than 100 million parameters.

IMAX to use AI to translate its original content in order to expand its global reach

IMAX is stepping up its game, announcing a partnership with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai, using its AI speech models to translate IMAX original content, including documentaries, to increase its global reach. The entertainment industry has been going through some gigantic shifts, with the entertainment and media industry growing 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023 according to a report published by PwC. The industry is expected to continue its momentum, with a compound annual growth rate of around 4% to $3.4 trillion in the next 5 years. The fact that non-English language content is growing rapidly (even in English markets) including the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. Netflix reported 90% growth in its viewership of non-English content in the UK over the last 3 years, reports Yahoo Finance. Mark Welton, Global President of IMAX Theatres said: "While we are only in the beginning stages of the partnership, we will continue to work together to better explore its potential and how it can best move us forward". Akshat Prakash, co-founder and CTO of Camb.ai, in an exclusive interview said: "Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have a different vision of society. They're trying to build models that are very horizontal and can cover a large breadth of tasks. ... We don't have to do that at all. Some of our models are less than 100 million parameters and are super specialized".

IMAX embraces AI to expand original content reach | TechCrunch

With global content consumption rising and demand for non-English content surpassing that for English movies and shows, IMAX is leveraging AI to scale localization on its original content. The entertainment and media industry grew 5% to $2.8 trillion in 2023, according to a report by PwC. The industry is expected to continue its expansion, though at a modest compound annual growth rate of nearly 4% to $3.4 trillion over the next five years. Non-English language content is growing rapidly even in English markets, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. Last year, Netflix reported a 90% growth in its viewership of non-English content in the U.K. over the last three years. IMAX has taken all this into account and is now exploring localization using AI to get more eyeballs. On Monday, the Canadian production theater company, known for its massive theaters and immersive movie experiences, announced its partnership with Dubai-based startup Camb.ai to use its AI speech models to translate original content, including documentaries. Camb.ai, which has already deployed its AI dubbing and speech translation for live sports events and leagues including the Australian Open, Eurovision Sport, and Major League Soccer, offers its Boli model for speech-to-text translation and Mars for speech emulation. The models are available through the startup's DubStudio platform, which supports 140 languages, including various low-resource languages that do not have significant data on the internet. "Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have a different vision of society," said Akshat Prakash, co-founder and CTO of Camb.ai, in an exclusive interview. "They're trying to build models that are very horizontal, and can cover a large breadth of tasks... We don't have to do that at all. Some of our models are less than 100 million parameters and are super specialized." Prakash, a former Apple engineer who worked with the team developing AI and ML models for Siri, co-founded Camb.ai with his father Avneesh Prakash last year. "We are a generation apart, and growing up in India. Thirty years apart, we encountered the same language challenges," the CTO told TechCrunch. He said that Camb.ai pre-trained 70% of its models using academic-licensed data sets, which are commercially usable. The remaining 30% involves fine-tuning data it gets through early partners who deploy its models for AI-based dubbing and translation. "What we don't do, and we've been very careful and completely avoiding that, is potentially scrapping the internet," Prakash asserted. "Some companies feel that they can get away with it because they're building a consumer-facing app or tool, and they believe it's fine to scrape, like 10 petabytes of the internet." Camb.ai uses a "three-layer" approach to provide AI-based translation, comprising the foundation layer of its Boli and Mars models, the infrastructure layer that hosts these AI models, and then the DubStudio platform for the front end. Unlike other AI-based models, Camb.ai's Boli takes input speech tokens, produces output text tokens in the translated language, and retains nuances, Prakash claims. Once Boli generates the text, Mars translates the text into speech using the same audio input signal to capture the performance of the actual audio, including ambient sound, such as the background score of the audience cheering in the case of sports events, he said. Prakash told TechCrunch that Camb.ai's tech delivers speech translation in up to 10 languages simultaneously with 20 to 30 seconds of latency, which can be covered by the streaming and broadcasting delay of 30 to 40 seconds. IMAX will roll out AI translations in stages, starting with high-resource languages. The deployment comes after internal testing of Camb.ai's tech on its original content. "While we are only in the beginning stages of the partnership, we will continue to work together to better explore its potential and how it can best move us forward," said Mark Welton, President of IMAX Global Theatres. Welton indicated that the AI deployment would help save on translation costs without disclosing specifics. Camb.ai currently has a team of 50 people. In February, it raised $4 million in a seed round led by Courtside Ventures. Prakash told TechCrunch that the startup is closing a bigger, pre-Series A round to expand its reach and headcount.