Harvard University Hires Swiss AI Firm Vidby to Translate Training Videos

The renowned Harvard University strides itself for being one of the most innovative higher educational institutions in the world. However, even a master university can’t do everything by itself. In an attempt to support medical staff in Ukraine, the educational behemoth has partnered with Swiss-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) vidby, which provides automated video translation and dubbing services into 70 languages. The main goal of the collaboration is to train doctors and military doctors to provide medical care in the war zone in Ukraine.

Using AI to Eliminate Language Barriers

There are plenty of text translation services that enable easy access to information in various languages, but only offer written translation, which only makes up for a small percentage of digital content across the internet. In this case, Harvard University reached out to multiple translators and translation agencies, but none were able to meet the required quality control, convenience, speed, and ease of ordering.

The task required solving rather complex challenges in the translation, which apparently translating agencies cannot solve due to their limitations. Since the videos contain a lot of medical terms, there are many nuances in the pronunciation of words, which require increased accuracy and the possibility of mandatory coordination with the client. And that’s exactly where vidby came in.

vidby translated a total of 21 training videos from English into Ukrainian —taking care of pronunciation and stress in each word to provide an accurate result. “All videos were carefully translated to meet the requirements, as well as thoroughly checked and approved by the University,” says Alexander Konovalov, co-founder at vidby.

The company is now getting ready to launch a new stage of cooperation with Harvard. The videos were posted on Global Medical Knowledge Alliance’s YouTube channel.

Vidby sees itself on a mission to democratise information access for the world by preserving linguistic diversity in the world. It aims to achieve this by using AI-powered video and dubbing translation technology that can translate and dub a one-minute segment of a video with up to 99% accuracy within 24 hours. By far, it’s the only translating company that has managed to create speech technologies capable of correctly translating the pronunciation of names in all languages, work with pauses in speech, context, and nuance in pronunciation.

“It’s an honour to be chosen by Harvard to translate and dub critical information when required. Our AI-powered technology is available to anyone globally, and allows us to do more than written translations. We want to ensure the progress of an ecosystem with democratised information access and help shape the future for everyone,” adds Denis Krasnikov, partner at vidby and responsible for the interactions and processes with Harvard.

Final Thoughts: Could vidby Reshape the Translating Market With AI?

Most translators and translating agencies are limited in their capacity to translate language as they usually can’t understand the context, the nuance of word pronunciation, and other important aspects of written and spoken language —especially if the languages are from different roots.

The fact that vidby is using AI-based technology to provide a nearly perfect translation and dubbing into multiple languages marks a revolutionary breakthrough in the translation and video markets. vidby could therefore eliminate language barriers while making information access available to all languages globally.