Organizers of a European Union–supported software sharing platform for language technologies are planting seeds for applications that could debut on it with some eye-catching results: We might see the sprouting of a Basque-speaking, Alexa-style home language assistant, for instance.
Unbabel, the AI+human translation platform, has raised a $60 million Series C round, led by Point72 Ventures, along with e.ventures, Greycroft, and Indico Capital Partners. The latest investment is nearly three times the $23 million Series B raised in 2018, bringing the company’s total funding to $91 million.
Trint, the London-based transcription startup founded by Emmy-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding.
The round includes follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, with participation from TechNexus, and The Associated Press.
Machine translation has come on strong in recent years, with myriad online tools and apps serving as decent alternatives to the arduous process of, well, learning a new language yourself.
Dictionary app Reverso is getting a major update with a focus on voice features. In particular, you can now say a phrase to translate it. This might be particularly useful if you can’t spell a word or when you don’t know anything about a language and you can ask the other person to repeat a phrase to get a translation.
