The global translation service market holds a significant value, estimated to be around $40 billion by various analysts. Within this vast market, enterprise services play a crucial role. Meanwhile, for consumers, apps like Google Translate and Apple Translate have gained dominance, yet they lack the capability to handle calls and voice messages effectively.

EzDubs: Transforming Person-to-Person Translation

Y Combinator-backed EzDubs aims to address the issue of person-to-person translation through its innovative app. This app supports translation for calls, voice messages, and text in over 30 languages. It was founded in 2023 by Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, Amrutavarsh Kinagi, and Kareem Nassar. Krishnamurthy and Kinagi first met during college in Hong Kong and built a project that read lips and translated speech into text for those with hearing loss. In 2021, they moved to Columbia University and began working on video dubbing. There, they met Nassar, who was leading Cisco's Speech AI Group while pursuing a master's degree part-time. Nassar had extensive experience in real-time speech AI products and later created Voicea, which was sold to Cisco. The trio officially started building EzDubs in 2023 with a dubbing model and an early version of a translation tool.The company initially launched a Twitter/X bot in January 2023 that translated clips on the platform. This bot has amassed over 340,000 followers and receives more than 500 dub requests daily, with translated videos getting over a million daily views. In July 2023, they launched a bot on WhatsApp, enabling users to translate voice messages and videos. However, users had to forward voice messages to the bot, get the reply translated, and then send it back. To overcome this, they decided to build their own app and released an early version this year.Krishnamurthy emphasized that partners at Y Combinator advised them that if they could solve the problem of communication latency in different languages, a communication platform would have a more significant downstream effect than video. This led them to opt for building a communication app instead of focusing solely on video dubbing.The EzDubs app, available on iOS and Android, offers real-time translation for calls with support for 30 languages. Users can call someone speaking a different language and receive an instant translation. The other person doesn't need to have the EzDubs app. The app also provides translation for text, voice, and video messages.Although users can share translated voice or video messages outside the app using a link, the founders believe that for those communicating in multiple languages, platforms like WhatsApp and iMessage are not sufficient. EzDubs has noted that many people use their app to make hundreds of calls daily, with an average call time of 17 minutes. The top use cases include people dating across cultures and professionals communicating with locals while abroad.At the core, EzDubs has two main models: one for voice cloning while maintaining the conveyed emotions and another for translation. The translation model is designed to handle interruptions and doesn't wait for a person to finish a whole sentence before starting internal translation.EzDubs has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Venture Highway founded by ex-WhatsApp CBO Neeraj Arora. Other participants include Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Replit president Michele Catasta, Applied Intuition's CEO Qasar Younis, and a16z-backed cloud startup Replicate's CEO Ben Fishman.Friedman pointed out that the company is on a path to making translation tools easily accessible to users. He believes in the product due to the founders' rich history in speech and language learning. He added that even within a company, there are language barriers that can hinder efficient communication, and EzDubs can remove these barriers.The company is soon launching a feature that allows users to scan a QR code and initiate an EzDubs call instantly without downloading the app. The founders stated that while apps like Google Translate have a real-time mode, it requires passing the phone back and forth. Eventually, they aim to make EzDubs a default phone calling app to handle incoming calls as well.In the coming months, EzDubs plans to build an extension for apps like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Slack.