DeepL, a German company that gained a profile with online text translation, has released DeepL Voice, a B2B tool that translates to captions in real time. DeepL Voice debuts in two iterations: DeepL Voice for Meetings, which allows participants to speak in their preferred language while serving colleagues with captions, and DeepL Voice for Conversations, which works on mobile devices, facilitating in-person, one-on-one conversations “with customers, colleagues or anyone else, in the language that works best for them,” the company explains, noting that real-time voice translation offers specific challenges.

“You’re dealing with incomplete input, pronunciation issues, latency and more, all of which can lead to inaccurate translations and even more confusion,” the DeepL team writes in an announcement, adding that “in building our solution for voice translation, we knew it had to be incredibly fast and accurate.”

“Translated captions are available for all of the 33 languages currently supported by DeepL Translator,” reports TechCrunch. DeepL founder and CEO Jarek Kutylowski tells TechCrunch, “[Voice] is where translation is going to play out in the next year.”

For real-time conversations, “you can set up your translations to appear as ‘mirrors’ on a smartphone — the idea being that you put the phone between you on a meeting table for each side to see the words translated — or as a transcription that you share side by side with someone,” TechCrunch explains.

For videoconferencing, the translations appearing as subtitles.

DeepL Voice “runs on the same neural networks as the company’s text-to-text offering,” described by the company as the “world’s best” AI translator, The Next Web points out, opining that in competing products its writer tried “the translation quality is pretty poor,” due to “a lag that renders them pretty useless.”

DeepL’s approach stems from focus on “the architecture of its neural networks, the input from human editors, and the training data,” TNW says.

TechCrunch lists Google as “one of DeepL’s biggest competitors,” with real-time captions for Meet available on Android for videoconferencing, and cites there are a multitude of AI startups building voice translation services, such as AI voice specialist ElevenLabs (ElevenLabs Dubbing), and Panjaya, which creates translations using ‘deepfake’ voices and video that matches the audio” in a platform called BodyTalk.