Kites Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions

History

2021: Zoom bought Kites

At the end of June 2021, it became known that video conferencings Zoom the German the platform acquired a company called Kites (short for Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), which develops software for real-time translation and transcription of speech.

Zoom bought the developer of the Kites real-time speech translation system

The company's website says that Kites originated at the Institute of Technology, and Karlsruhe this technology was originally developed for foreign students who did not always understand the intricacies of English or German, in which their teachers lectured. As a result, in 2015, Institute teachers Alex Waibel and Sebastian Stüker founded startup Kites. The speech translation platform they developed allows you to display translated text before the speaker finishes the sentence. Thanks to the AI transcript, it is automatically corrected if after additional context a more accurate translation is obtained. It is known that the company's developments are used in academia and government. Germany

According to Zoom executives, this acquisition is one of the necessary measures that will ultimately help the platform significantly simplify communication between people who speak different languages. Zoom already offers a real-time speech transcription function, but only for English-speaking users. In addition, the real-time transcription service used does not always meet the established accuracy requirements. Therefore, Zoom intends to integrate Kites technology into its service, and the startup team of 12 research scientists will help the company "increase the performance and efficiency of meetings by providing Zoom users with multi-language translation capabilities."^[1]

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