Zoom has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – kites, GmbH (“Kites”), a German start-up dedicated to developing real-time Machine Translation (MT) solutions.
Both companies are yet to reveal the terms of the agreement, but the partnership with Kites will give Zoom a team of top researchers, who can help enhance the machine-learning translation knowledge at the company.
“With our aligned missions to make collaboration frictionless – regardless of language, geographic location, or other barriers – we are confident Kites’ impressive team will fit right in with Zoom,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering at Zoom.
Kites, which has a talented team of twelve research scientists, will help Zoom’s engineering team advance the field of [machine translation] to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multi-language translation capabilities for Zoom users.
From the description of the agreement it appears that those 12 researchers will be added to Zoom’s engineering team making it look like a hiring process. Zoom intends to leave the team stationed in Germany with plans to build a machine-learning translation R&D centre with additional hires over time as it puts more resources into this area.
Kites thinks Zoom is the best partner to help advance its mission to break down language barriers and make seamless cross-language interaction a reality of everyday life.
Dr. Alex Waibel and Dr. Sebastian Stüker, Kites’ founders, are faculty members of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology where the Kites has its academic roots. It was founded in 2015 by the two researchers with the express purpose of transforming the latest research in speech translation technology into viable products.
Dr. Stüker and the rest of the Kites team will remain based in Karlsruhe, Germany, where Zoom looks forward to investing in growing the team. We are exploring opening an R&D center in Germany in the future. Dr. Waibel will become a Zoom Research Fellow, a role in which he will advise on Zoom’s MT research and development.
