Akshat Prakash, chief technology officer and co-founder at Camb.AI, outlines his plans for the AI dubbing company to use its success in live sport to reach the content distribution market.

Headquartered in Dubai, Camb.AI has quickly established itself as a key player in the content dubbing business. Founded by father-and-son team Avneesh and Akshat Prakash, the company’s AI-powered dubbing tools have already been embraced by global partners across live sport, film and social media.

The company’s key targets include content distributors looking to monetise their programme archives more effectively by allowing them to dub their content into more languages and reach previously untapped markets.
Chief technology officer Akshat Prakash says the tech-powered start-up “recently created history when we live-streamed a Major League Soccer [MLS] game in four languages. The match was completely translated using Camb.AI’s proprietary technology.”

Prakash says establishing the company in sport has been a top priority for Camb.AI because it is such a complex genre to dub. Aside from the MLS live stream, for example, the company worked with the Australian Open to enable post-match conferences in multiple languages. In a separate development, it partnered with Eurovision Sport, translating live commentary from French to Portuguese at the 2024 World Athletics U20 Championships in Lima.

“Over and above the unique challenges inherent in dubbing live sport, you have background noise from fans, multiple commentators that keep varying in their level of emotions, and vocabularies that are often highly specific to their sport. We knew if we could get good at dubbing sports, then most other types of content would essentially be subsets of the problems we encountered there,” he says.
Take education, says Prakash, “where you encounter similar issues with specialised vocabulary. Or drama programming, where you also get a broad range of emotions. It’s like the old adage ‘Being good at sports can prepare you for life.’”

Other highlights of the company’s burgeoning showreel include UAE writer/director Nayla Al Khaja’s film Three, which it translated from Arabic into Mandarin. Camb.AI has also helped YouTubers like celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni and BeerBiceps scale their content into more than 30 languages.

“A key point to make is that our tools can capture and convey the speaker’s original tone and nuance,” says Prakash. “It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing Turkish or Russian or Spanish, our tools ensure that the translated content remains as powerful and engaging as the original, maintaining the intended impact.”

While Camb.AI has yet to make major inroads into the TV distribution sector, Prakash says it is an obvious move – particularly with the expansion of AVoD, FAST and YouTube channels. “We’re like the content business’s recycling people,” he says. “There are companies with archives that have played out many times in their original language. They can’t monetise it anymore, so it’s just gathering dust. But suddenly, if they can translate it into 10 languages, they increase their fan base and monetisation potential.”

Camb.AI is a young firm but it comes with a wealth of credibility and experience. Prakash the elder has worked at leading corporations including industrial conglomerate Tata, broadcaster Zee Network and tech firm Idemia, where he contributed significantly to their digital transformation and growth. Akshat, meanwhile, studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and spent time as an engineer at Apple’s Siri.
Earlier this year, the firm received US$4m in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Courtside Ventures. Other investors have included Singapore-based TRTL Ventures, Texas-based growth equity firm Blue Star Innovation Partners, Japanese VC outfit Ikemori Ventures, Japanese web designer Eisaburo Maeda and the Dubai Future District Fund.

Explaining his enthusiasm, Vasu Kulkarni, partner at Courtside, says: “Growing up in India, a land of over 700 languages, I saw first-hand how difficult it can be to consume the plethora of content out there when you couldn’t understand it. For NBA fans in India to potentially be able to watch Steph Curry while listening to the indelible Mike Breen commentating in Hindi is going to globalise the game even further.”

With a new funding round coming soon, Prakash says: “We’re investing a lot in our core technology, across talent and infrastructure. The quality of our tech team is one of the things that sets us apart from our rivals. We’re not just chaining together a few APIs. The code we are writing is foundational in nature. We have open sourced some of our speech models, which have trended strongly on global leader boards.”

Sales is another key focus for the fast-growing firm. From Dubai’s time zone, Prakash says Camb.AI is perfectly positioned to service the global market. He also points to the recent appointment of former BBC Studios and All3Media International exec Janel Downing as director of sales and business development for the Americas.

“We launched commercially less than a year ago, but the level of adoption we are seeing means we are growing every day. For the first time, the content industry is moving beyond seeing AI as a fun thing and looking at its enterprise value,” he says.

In terms of harnessing Camb.AI’s solutions, customers can access an SaaS platform called Studio, which is built on two foundational pieces of AI technology, called Mars and Boli. This enables them to perform tasks such as text-to-speech, text translation and video dubbing. “We’ve also built a translation and dubbing product called DubStream, which enables broadcast engineers to do multilingual live streaming,” Prakash says.

AI delivers high levels of accuracy, but he stresses that the tech is still evolving. “No AI can ever be 100% accurate. When people take up AI at this early stage, they must understand it’s a promise of the future. That said, we’ve fine-tuned our tools on extremely hard-use cases. We’ve reached the point where enterprises have been confident using this technology live in front of their fans for several months.”

While content dubbing is spearheading the company’s early phase of growth, Prakash believes there is a lot more at stake. “A lot of generative AI right now is about efficiency gains – optimising workflows or summarising documents. That’s fine, but what Camb.AI is fundamentally addressing is the way that language has been a barrier to consumer and enterprise communication for so long. More than just translating and dubbing, we want people to embrace Camb.AI as their official language partner.”

Unpacking this point, he says: “Transforming audio and video into another language is just the first step for enterprises. The tech we have developed also has implications for B2B activities like multilingual engagement, multilingual PR, blogging and internal communications. We have a product called Chatterbox that enables cross-lingual voice chat. You can start speaking in whatever language you want, and with minimal delay your respondent will start hearing in the language they understand best.”

This potentially has consumer-facing implications as well. “We recently released a product called Savant, which facilitates cross-lingual chat. So you could be typing English, and when you hit enter, it’ll translate into Spanish or Arabic, for example. The internet was made for English speakers and we want to redesign it for the world,” says Prakash.

Akshat Prakash, chief technology officer and co-founder at Camb.AI, outlines his plans for the AI dubbing company to use its success in live sport to reach the content distribution market.

Headquartered in Dubai, Camb.AI has quickly established itself as a key player in the content dubbing business. Founded by father-and-son team Avneesh and Akshat Prakash, the company’s AI-powered dubbing tools have already been embraced by global partners across live sport, film and social media.

The company’s key targets include content distributors looking to monetise their programme archives more effectively by allowing them to dub their content into more languages and reach previously untapped markets.
Chief technology officer Akshat Prakash says the tech-powered start-up “recently created history when we live-streamed a Major League Soccer [MLS] game in four languages. The match was completely translated using Camb.AI’s proprietary technology.”

Prakash says establishing the company in sport has been a top priority for Camb.AI because it is such a complex genre to dub. Aside from the MLS live stream, for example, the company worked with the Australian Open to enable post-match conferences in multiple languages. In a separate development, it partnered with Eurovision Sport, translating live commentary from French to Portuguese at the 2024 World Athletics U20 Championships in Lima.

“Over and above the unique challenges inherent in dubbing live sport, you have background noise from fans, multiple commentators that keep varying in their level of emotions, and vocabularies that are often highly specific to their sport. We knew if we could get good at dubbing sports, then most other types of content would essentially be subsets of the problems we encountered there,” he says.
Take education, says Prakash, “where you encounter similar issues with specialised vocabulary. Or drama programming, where you also get a broad range of emotions. It’s like the old adage ‘Being good at sports can prepare you for life.’”

Other highlights of the company’s burgeoning showreel include UAE writer/director Nayla Al Khaja’s film Three, which it translated from Arabic into Mandarin. Camb.AI has also helped YouTubers like celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni and BeerBiceps scale their content into more than 30 languages.

“A key point to make is that our tools can capture and convey the speaker’s original tone and nuance,” says Prakash. “It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing Turkish or Russian or Spanish, our tools ensure that the translated content remains as powerful and engaging as the original, maintaining the intended impact.”

While Camb.AI has yet to make major inroads into the TV distribution sector, Prakash says it is an obvious move – particularly with the expansion of AVoD, FAST and YouTube channels. “We’re like the content business’s recycling people,” he says. “There are companies with archives that have played out many times in their original language. They can’t monetise it anymore, so it’s just gathering dust. But suddenly, if they can translate it into 10 languages, they increase their fan base and monetisation potential.”

Camb.AI is a young firm but it comes with a wealth of credibility and experience. Prakash the elder has worked at leading corporations including industrial conglomerate Tata, broadcaster Zee Network and tech firm Idemia, where he contributed significantly to their digital transformation and growth. Akshat, meanwhile, studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and spent time as an engineer at Apple’s Siri.
Earlier this year, the firm received US$4m in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Courtside Ventures. Other investors have included Singapore-based TRTL Ventures, Texas-based growth equity firm Blue Star Innovation Partners, Japanese VC outfit Ikemori Ventures, Japanese web designer Eisaburo Maeda and the Dubai Future District Fund.

Explaining his enthusiasm, Vasu Kulkarni, partner at Courtside, says: “Growing up in India, a land of over 700 languages, I saw first-hand how difficult it can be to consume the plethora of content out there when you couldn’t understand it. For NBA fans in India to potentially be able to watch Steph Curry while listening to the indelible Mike Breen commentating in Hindi is going to globalise the game even further.”

With a new funding round coming soon, Prakash says: “We’re investing a lot in our core technology, across talent and infrastructure. The quality of our tech team is one of the things that sets us apart from our rivals. We’re not just chaining together a few APIs. The code we are writing is foundational in nature. We have open sourced some of our speech models, which have trended strongly on global leader boards.”

Sales is another key focus for the fast-growing firm. From Dubai’s time zone, Prakash says Camb.AI is perfectly positioned to service the global market. He also points to the recent appointment of former BBC Studios and All3Media International exec Janel Downing as director of sales and business development for the Americas.

“We launched commercially less than a year ago, but the level of adoption we are seeing means we are growing every day. For the first time, the content industry is moving beyond seeing AI as a fun thing and looking at its enterprise value,” he says.

In terms of harnessing Camb.AI’s solutions, customers can access an SaaS platform called Studio, which is built on two foundational pieces of AI technology, called Mars and Boli. This enables them to perform tasks such as text-to-speech, text translation and video dubbing. “We’ve also built a translation and dubbing product called DubStream, which enables broadcast engineers to do multilingual live streaming,” Prakash says.

AI delivers high levels of accuracy, but he stresses that the tech is still evolving. “No AI can ever be 100% accurate. When people take up AI at this early stage, they must understand it’s a promise of the future. That said, we’ve fine-tuned our tools on extremely hard-use cases. We’ve reached the point where enterprises have been confident using this technology live in front of their fans for several months.”

While content dubbing is spearheading the company’s early phase of growth, Prakash believes there is a lot more at stake. “A lot of generative AI right now is about efficiency gains – optimising workflows or summarising documents. That’s fine, but what Camb.AI is fundamentally addressing is the way that language has been a barrier to consumer and enterprise communication for so long. More than just translating and dubbing, we want people to embrace Camb.AI as their official language partner.”

Unpacking this point, he says: “Transforming audio and video into another language is just the first step for enterprises. The tech we have developed also has implications for B2B activities like multilingual engagement, multilingual PR, blogging and internal communications. We have a product called Chatterbox that enables cross-lingual voice chat. You can start speaking in whatever language you want, and with minimal delay your respondent will start hearing in the language they understand best.”

This potentially has consumer-facing implications as well. “We recently released a product called Savant, which facilitates cross-lingual chat. So you could be typing English, and when you hit enter, it’ll translate into Spanish or Arabic, for example. The internet was made for English speakers and we want to redesign it for the world,” says Prakash.