“The biggest oak starts from an acorn, and if you want to do anything new, you’ve got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree, and maybe one day it will be a big business on its own. We know that big things start small.” — Jeff Bezos

To begin, some backstory. Growing up in India’s North Belt, you usually get house help from not-so-privileged backgrounds; I was fortunate that mine was the same age as me. After spending most of my years outside, when I was home during the pandemic, I began watching my favorite show, Rick and Morty. Regardless of how much he enjoyed the visual, he was unable to comprehend any of it. Lacking a connection, I started watching his non-English content.

This scenario was vivid when Anuja Dhawan, my then-friend and now co-founder, approached me when we were discussing her recent side passion of assisting underprivileged women in their jobs. She described how a UPSC applicant struggled to find a suitable law school content source. This is when I performed some research and discovered that there is no reliable source for such content in Hindi or any other vernacular language. And here we started brainstorming our minds & started working on it.

? The Problem

Content development has always been challenging due to various teams, long planning deadlines, expensive prices, and complex software.

The entire process is manual, and creating videos in multiple languages massively increases the time and work required. When content producers consider turning multilingual, they have a succession of thoughts: “I don’t even know the language; how will I complete the translation? Where can I look for translators? Who is going to perform my voiceover? What method will I use to edit the video?”

? Welcome Dubverse

With the mission “Every video will go multi-lingual”, Dubverse was founded.

Short-form videos, educational content, webinars, news, presentations, streaming, high-quality videos, and even your everyday online meetings are all included when we say “every video.”

We’re designing Dubverse to lower the cost of producing video content, this will be accomplished through automating existing workflows, developing AI-assisted human tools, and making editing and post-production simple and accessible.

▶️ The Product

Dubverse uses Deep Learning and AI to allow content creators to dub videos from one language to another, in almost real-time, for half the cost. The product simplifies the difficult and time-consuming process of dubbing videos into a simple drag-and-drop procedure.

We recognize that there is no single way to express oneself in all languages, so we have powerful features that allow human evaluation at each step, ensuring that the essence of the video is conveyed in the output video.

We take a single video and make many copies of it in real-time, in various languages, without requiring multiple humans in the production process. We currently support ten Indian vernacular languages and twenty foreign languages. This seemed impossible, but we made it happen! We’re privileged to collaborate with a few major brands across the country, as well as the most innovative startups leading the way for #builtforbharat, to dub their content in various vernacular languages.

??‍? Dubbing using Technology

Video dubbing is a three-part process, starting with transcription of the input video, next comes translation in the required language and the final step is the voice-over. At Dubverse, we power all three, using technology. We deliver value to the content creators, by generating multi-lingual content in real-time using their video content as the base.

On top of this, we have built power-packed features like editing, language-specific pronunciation, whitelisting of words, translation score, and much more.

Are you excited to try it, visit here — preview.dubverse.ai

? Artificial Intelligence

We have our in-house AI engine for creating voice-overs, which has enabled us to have an extensive voice-over library. The creator can choose from a variety of voices from our voiceover library, whether one needs a 25-year-old dynamic voice for the product explainers or baby voices for children’s content, we have it all covered.

Here’s a preview of Anuja Dhawan’s voice, which we cloned and made available through our simple text-to-speech pipeline.

We like to call it ‘Anujaverse’.

? Market

Out of the total internet base, more than 80% of all the data consumed is through videos. The video user base in India is over 350 million, and growing at 24 percent annually from 2018 to 2020 — two times faster than countries such as China and Indonesia.

We believe that the dubbing problem must be addressed at scale. After talking to a wide range of content creators for five months, we understood how important it is for a content creator to be multilingual. The content economy is being disrupted at breakneck speed, and anyone who wants to stay ahead of the game must constantly invent and expand their reach. With the introduction of low-cost internet around the world, demand for vernacular material is already exploding and is predicted to quadruple in the coming years.

We are building a product for the video content creators who want to expand their audience by overcoming the language barrier. Consumers for such content are online across the world, split by spoken language. The market for Dubverse varies from ed-techs focusing on offering value in regional languages to a Youtuber reviewing a new mobile phone, to an individual educating the masses on the share market, cryptocurrency, the use-cases are endless.

? Business Update

As the year 2021 draws to a close, we leave it on a high note. We’ve completed over 100 hours of video dubbing in 12 languages, working with marketers and content developers from all over the industry.

It was an exciting year for us as it was the first time we shared our mission with the world, which is to bridge the global language divide. It was both terrifying and thrilling at the same time; we were confident about the impact of the problem we were addressing, but market acceptance, majorly from the creators, was critical.

To our surprise, everyone we spoke with was in the same situation; they had an audience outside of English, but the thought of going through the process of creating a video in each language, one by one, never allowed them to take advantage of the opportunity.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with a diverse range of content creators, from marketing videos for Lead School that helped them increase top-of-the-funnel conversions by dubbing videos in seven languages, to product explainer videos for Vyapar that allowed them to engage with their customers in ten languages. We also enabled a UK-based NGO, Think Equal, in penetrating the Indian market by dubbing their educational content from English to Hindi using our technology.

A few kind words from our users:

“We have worked with Dubverse and used the services for converting a lot of our tutorial videos into 8 different languages. The platform built has been really helpful for us providing high quality conversions at a very reasonable cost.”

“We got great feedback specifically on the speed of the videos from internal teams. Great job!”

? The Year Ahead

With a core belief that content is a supply problem, there will be an increasing number of content creators who want to create more, but the barrier to creation remains high. However, with new-age platforms like Canva, Invideo, and Figma, we can see these barriers lowering, as more content creators are joining the force.

Our goal is to help artists expand the reach of their videos by avoiding linguistic barriers, with the least amount of effort possible. The technology, not the creator, should be reproducing the same content in several languages in 2022; this is one job we should be grateful AI can replace!

We want to create a brand for content creators that will make their lives easier and multiply their reach.

We believe that as content creators become more integral to internet consumption, we will become increasingly significant in the metaverse. We will be the powerhouse of content creation at scale, helping millions of creators produce content using generative AI, whether it be web2 or web3.

? Synthetic Media

We’re delighted to work in the synthetic media sector. To begin with, AI will automate fundamental creation activities or provide an augmented solution where you may generate any type of material — text, narration, music, photos, and even video.

For more you can follow Varshul CW’s thread here:

With the closing of this eventful year, we want to express our gratitude to our early adopters who believed in us, and our dynamic team who is shaping our vision of “making every video multi-lingual”, closer to reality.

To end 2021 on a high, we are launching our new logo, with this we will re-define the creator economy and the content game in the vernacular space.

Wish you all a very Happy New year 2022!

If you are a content creator and want to try our product, do write to us at [email protected]

Onwards ?