2025 Recap and 2026 Predictions!

0:00Florian Faes:Multilingual voice AI and audio AI continue to be a hotspot for startups and investors.

0:13Esther Bond:Hey everyone, and welcome to a very special year-end episode of SlatorPod. Hi there, Esther.

0:18Florian Faes:Hi, Florian.

0:20Esther Bond:37th podcast this year. Shelby, the last one. How are you?

0:24Florian Faes:Pretty good. Looking forward to finding out all about what's happened in 2025 and unpacking that with you.

0:30Esther Bond:100%, and we're relying very heavily on our very most recent research report, which is the Slater 2025 market recap, phenomenal report out this week. 120 pages, great recap of the year and available now for subscribers. And you can also get it as a standalone report. So we're going to go through this and we're also going to do a quick predictions and outlook segment at the end. And before that, quick reminder, SlaterCon London coming up on May 22nd. Tickets available now, so go and get it. So what we want to try to do today is to go through 2025 month by month, and we're going to pick one random piece of news, one random development, one something that we consider to be important in that particular month.

1:18Esther Bond:This is the first time we're doing this, so cut us some slack. We'll give our best, all right? So I guess we said that you were going to start with January. I'll take February and then you're going to do March and so on and so forth. So, it's going to be a very tough one to summarize for any AI you guys are using because it's going to be a very eclectic choice of individual pieces of news or developments that we're going to go through. So, just very briefly before we get started, I mean, the report itself is structured as basically news and insights by month. And then we have another 40 pages of research highlights from our very own research.

2:03Esther Bond:Very, very great. So yeah, it's about 40 pages. So you get a lot of intel that is otherwise in our standalone reports. And then we end on 30 pages of thought leadership, bunch of interviews and things that we've recorded, podcast insights, et cetera. So tons of tons of value in this report first time we publish it. All right, without further ado, let's get started. And we haven't even rehearsed this at all. So I'm actually curious what you're thinking about what's important for January, Esther, January 2025.

2:37Florian Faes:It could be interesting. But yes, this is our, I suppose, super condensed analysis or pick. And I'm already going to break the rules because I have two stories for January. But they do have a commonality, which is the number 180. So yeah, my top picks for January 2025 was firstly the news that Synthesia had closed a$180 million round, a Series D. And secondly, that Eleven Labs had also raised$180 million, but this time in a Series C round. So my picks, if you like, are two sort of fairly large funding stories.

3:18Esther Bond:The question is, have they spent those$180 million each wisely in the past 11 months? We shall see. We shall see. 11 Labs seems like it because they just announced a big deal with Meta, which is a beautiful segue to one of the stories that I have for February, Esther, which is, if I pick February there, Meta launches language technology partner program to source AI translation data. so this built on the earlier efforts by Meta including the no language left behind massively multilingual speech projects that they have and this was basically a call to action for language technology partners to contribute speech recordings, transcriptions, written text, translated sentences especially for the underserved and low resource languages contributors were required to provide at least 10 hours of speech data with transcriptions plus 200 sentences So interesting partner program by Meta there.

4:18Esther Bond:And then, yeah, I'm also adding a second story, sorry. It was that study that Anthropic ran where they looked at 4 million cloud conversations and suggested that translators lead kind of the general adoption of AI as a quality assurance tool. So that was Jan and Feb.

4:38Florian Faes:Marge, well, maybe we could frame this more like a sort of top pick and then like a runner up or something like that, because I'm also going to mention too. McKinsey published its State of AI report in March. We liked this because it gave us a bit of an insight into their view on the role of a translator. And they said that they classified translator as an AI related role, for one thing, which is obviously relevant. And it also said that in the report that the adoption of AI translation technologies had become universal. You know, something that we know within our industry already, obviously validation from sort of this external expert also.

5:26Florian Faes:They also said that the hiring difficulty for translators had dropped. And that went from over 70 % difficulty in 2022, down to 55 % difficulty in 2024. So that was a good report and something to, I think, go click back on if you didn't read it at the time. My second top story that I think you have to mention, because it had a bit of a longer term and still impacting on various areas of the industry, was President Trump's designation of English as the sole official language of the US via executive order. And that kind of caused some ripples, I think, further on in the year as well.

6:08Esther Bond:That was probably one of our most viewed podcasts, I think that year with Deepak Patel from Globa and Peter Argandiza from Argo translation. Yeah, that was a very good one. English as a national language. Does the UK have a national language? Like officially, do you know that? Like codified somewhere?

6:26Florian Faes:My assumption is yes, but I wouldn't know. I don't know the sort of official channels for doing that because I mean, certainly there are other domestic languages like Welsh and Irish and Scotch.

6:41Esther Bond:whatever it is uh island gaelic but then obviously we have i mean our multilingual provision especially

6:48Florian Faes:within the public sector it is pretty extensive um like from in emails to just everywhere all sorts of communication at government level or um sort of council level either like a local level all of that is is pretty much um rolled out in seven or ten different languages that they would deemed to be most appropriate for the local community.

7:10Esther Bond:Also happened in March, Slater 2025 localization buyer survey. Just want to highlight the research. Actually, we skipped that for January where we had the AI interpreting. Speaking of interpreting, speaking of Trump and speaking of the United States and the national language, my story for April is that Microsoft, they had this piece of, I don't know, kind of semi-viral content where they said that new healthcare voice AI enables encounters in Spanish without a translator. And that's after they launched Microsoft Dragon Co-pilot, which was kind of a unified healthcare voice AI assistant combining Dragon Medical One with something called DAX to support clinical interactions.

7:53Esther Bond:Why relevant? US medical interpreting, huge market, right? And Microsoft going after it, if even just a little bit, seems to be a pretty big deal for the language industry. And then in April also, we published the 2025 Legal Services and Language AI Report. There's no month without AI. I can predict that already. All right. We'll jump to May.

8:19Florian Faes:So one of the top stories and my kind of pick also from the recap is Amazon's AI dubbing pilot for Prime Video. So this was a pilot, a dubbing pilot, as it suggests, which used, surprise, surprise, AI and human post editors to localize 12 titles into English and Spanish. So there was a bit of some quotes here from Amazon saying, AI-aided dubbing is only available on titles that do not have dubbing support. And we're eager to explore a new way to make series and movies more accessible and enjoyable. So the pilot itself covered 12 movies and series in English and Latin American and Spanish that they said would not have otherwise been dubbed.

9:07Esther Bond:I have yet to watch an AI-dubbed Amazon Prime video movie. It's also not huge. Amazon Prime is not big in Switzerland. I think they somehow, I mean, Amazon generally is just skipping Switzerland. I don't know why. Maybe because of the languages. All right, we shall move on to June and also AI dubbing. A big story there that RWS acquired the IP of LTP Papercup, language technology platform Papercup, which we had on the podcast way back. And then let me quote from RWS's half-year report that they say, we propose to integrate dubbing and sub-language capabilities into Trados to offer high-quality human-in-the-loop dubbing to media and enterprise clients who expect demand for both scale and quality in the fast-growing dubbing market.

9:57Esther Bond:I think that, yeah, that was the IP because remember the team, the actual team, the Papercup team, they went to Scale AI, the data annotator that was kind of now semi-owned by Meta, which kind of feels like an ancient story already that Meta bought or invested in Scale AI or bought Scale AI. So that was June and that was a, was that a slow month? Maybe a little bit slow.

10:25Florian Faes:Could have been.

10:27Esther Bond:So let's go to July.

10:29Florian Faes:Yeah, July was pretty interesting. I was going to also mention the AI dubbing rollout by YouTube. The trouble is that there's a bit of a spoiler because, you know, obviously fast forward sort of six months and we know how some of that unfolded. But the initial story back in July, I think, was that YouTube was doing this large scale rollout of AI dubbing. Obviously, there was lots of kind of testing and lots of people commenting and reacting to the rollout of AI dubbing on YouTube, on the platform. We also noted that our podcast had been automatically dubbed into more than 10 languages, right?

11:09Esther Bond:Behind the scenes, though, at least they didn't publish it. So, yeah, it was just sitting there for us to click publish.

11:14Florian Faes:Yeah, so you have some kind of control. At least it's not pushing this live without your sort of express permission. But yeah, I think the greatest story here is what unfolded a few months later, which is that there was a lot of pushback, a lot of backlash, essentially, because people were slamming the AI dubbing for being too robotic or even cringey. and I think putting a lot of pressure on YouTube for all creators to have access to this multi-language audio tracks so the ability to upload their own language tracks which had been available to some YouTube creators but not everybody so that was sort of the, I suppose, the latest outcome in that saga which happened in September

11:59Esther Bond:And I'm going to do something that I don't think we talked about but I have to go back to May because we forgot something We left something out, some big piece, which was our new market framework that was launched. The Language Industry Market Report, which included the framework back in 2020, like on the 22nd of May, we published it right before SlatorCon and that was basically our new industry view, which included the Language Solutions Integrator and Language Technology Platform framework and a ton of other stuff. Plus, we celebrated our 10 years anniversary in London with the entire company.

12:35Esther Bond:That was great.

12:36Florian Faes:Yeah. That was fun.

12:38Esther Bond:What was the bar called? Something with sheep? No. I'm not going to remember. No, no, no. The grazing goat.

12:45Florian Faes:Grazing goat.

12:47Esther Bond:It was called the grazing goat. They keep sending me emails now trying to get me back into the grazing goat in London. Maybe next year. All right. Okay. Let's go forward again. Jump from July to August. And in August, and this feels kind of like a throwback to earlier years, TransPerfect acquired Unbobble. I remember the 2021 or maybe in 2018 when we like every other week, we would have some type of big name transaction to report on. So yeah, in August 2025, TransPerfect acquired Unbobble to bolt down a bunch of AI capabilities. We don't want to unpack that too much, but Unbobble obviously, big name in the industry, they have a bunch of proprietary tech, the Tower Plus, the Tower L &M, Comet, all of this good stuff that's now getting integrated into the behemoth TransPerfect based in the town of New York.

13:45Esther Bond:And then also that was the August was when OpenAI started hiring for a localization manager, which I think they now filled that role, which obviously we unpacked at the time. The irony of OpenAI basically being one of the key drivers behind the whole disruption, AI replacement narrative. Not yet. Not yet. And the next thing they do, they hire a localization manager. So whoever got the job, congrats. I do want to add a third story, Cohere, LLM builder Cohere, they raised a big round and then they launched Command-A Translate, which is a major translation kind of offering, AI translation offering.

14:27Esther Bond:And then, yeah, we're very pleased to have the lead behind that project at SlaterCon in September. So what happened in September, Esther?

14:35Florian Faes:In September, I will talk about 11 lads again. So remember back in January, they raised 180 million. Well, in September, they launched Productions. So this was a managed service providing human edited multilingual content. So this is complete with permanent pricing, expert in the loop workflows, etc. This is interesting, I think, specifically because it signaled 11-lips expansion from pure tech, i.e. under the bounds of our new framework being an LTP, moving into becoming an LSI, a language solutions integrator with sort of full service offering.

15:21Esther Bond:That was big news for us. I wonder if they realized that they were transitioning from an LTP to an LSI by adding productions, but well, it is what it is.

15:31Florian Faes:It's fantastic.

15:33Esther Bond:And then I think we had one more story. If I'm looking at the notes here that we made, we did put together a few notes. I think the Middlebury College one is something we kind of want to briefly mention as well that is big news in academia yeah i think academia but

15:46Florian Faes:also just sort of in that part of the world by that i mean sort of you know california silicon valley localization globalization world i think you know we've made the comment before that there are many many uh industry professionals um i think you know very influential at this point in their career having gone to the Middlebury College, Middlebury Institute, right? So I think it's kind of sent a bit of, yeah, not shockwaves, but some concern and obviously sadness, I think, among that cohort that the graduate programs are closing.