Ofir Krakowski is the co-founder and CEO of Deepdub. With 30 years of experience in computer science and machine learning, he played a key role in founding and leading the Israeli Air Force’s machine learning and innovation department for 25 years.
Deepdub is an AI-driven dubbing company that leverages deep learning and voice cloning to provide high-quality, scalable localization for film, TV, and digital content. Founded in 2019, it enables content creators to preserve original performances while seamlessly translating dialogue into multiple languages. By integrating AI-powered speech synthesis with human linguistic oversight, Deepdub enhances global content accessibility, reducing the time and cost of traditional dubbing. The company has gained industry recognition for its innovation, securing major partnerships, certifications, and funding to expand its AI localization technology across the entertainment sector.
What inspired you to found Deepdub in 2019? Was there a particular moment or challenge that led to its creation?
Traditional dubbing has long been the industry standard for localizing content, but it’s an expensive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process. While AI-generated voice solutions existed, they lacked the emotional depth needed to truly capture an actor’s performance, making them unsuitable for high-quality, complex content.
We identified an opportunity to bridge this gap by developing an AI-powered localization solution that maintains the emotional authenticity of the original performance while drastically improving efficiency. We developed our proprietary eTTS™ (Emotion-Text-to-Speech) technology, which ensures that AI-generated voices carry the same emotional weight, tone, and nuance as human actors.
We envision a world where language and cultural barriers are no longer obstacles to global content accessibility. In creating our platform, we recognized the challenge of language limitations within entertainment, e-learning, FAST, and other industries, and set out to revolutionize content localization.
In order to ensure that Deepdub’s solution provided the highest quality localization and dubbing for complex content at scale, we decided to take a hybrid approach and incorporate linguistic and voice experts into the process, in conjunction with our eTTS™ technology.
Our vision is to democratize voice production, making it massively scalable, universally accessible, inclusive, and culturally relevant.
What were some of the biggest technical and business challenges you faced when launching Deepdub, and how did you overcome them?
Gaining the trust of the entertainment industry was a major hurdle when launching Deepdub. Hollywood has relied on traditional dubbing for decades, and shifting toward AI-driven solutions required demonstrating our ability to deliver studio-quality results in an industry often skeptical of AI.
To address this skepticism, we first enhanced the authenticity of our AI-generated voices by creating a fully licensed voice bank. This bank incorporates real human voice samples, significantly improving the naturalness and expressiveness of our output, which is crucial for acceptance in Hollywood.
Next, we developed proprietary technologies, such as eTTS™, along with features like Accent Control. These technologies ensure that AI-generated voices not only capture emotional depth and nuances but also adhere to the regional authenticity required for high-quality dubbing.
We also built a dedicated in-house post-production team that works closely with our technology. This team fine-tunes the AI outputs, ensuring every piece of content is polished and meets the industry’s high standards.
Furthermore, we expanded our approach to include a global network of human experts—voice actors, linguists, and directors from around the world. These professionals bring invaluable cultural insights and creative expertise, enhancing the cultural accuracy and emotional resonance of our dubbed content.
Our linguistics team works in tandem with our technology and global experts to ensure the language used is perfect for the target audience’s cultural context, further ensuring authenticity and compliance with local norms.
Through these strategies, combining advanced technology with a robust team of global experts and an in-house post-production team, Deepdub has successfully demonstrated to Hollywood and other top-tier production companies worldwide that AI can significantly enhance traditional dubbing workflows. This integration not only streamlines production but also expands possibilities for market expansion.
How does Deepdub’s AI-powered dubbing technology differ from traditional dubbing methods?
Traditional dubbing is labor intensive and a process that can take months per project, as it requires voice actors, sound engineers, and post-production teams to manually recreate dialogue in different languages. Our solution revolutionizes this process by offering a hybrid end-to-end solution – combining technology and human expertise – integrated directly into post-production workflows, thus reducing localization costs by up to 70% and turnaround times by up to 50%.
Unlike other AI-generated voice solutions, our proprietary eTTS™ technology allows for a level of emotional depth, cultural authenticity, and voice consistency that traditional methods struggle to achieve at scale.
Can you walk us through the hybrid approach Deepdub uses—how do AI and human expertise work together in the dubbing process?
Deepdub’s hybrid model combines the precision and scalability of AI with the creativity and cultural sensitivity of human expertise. Our approach blends the artistry of traditional dubbing with advanced AI technology, ensuring that localized content retains the emotional authenticity and impact of the original.
Our solution leverages AI to automate the groundwork aspects of localization, while human professionals refine the emotional nuances, accents, and cultural details. We incorporate both our proprietary eTTs™ and our Voice-to-Voice (V2V) technologies to enhance the natural expressiveness of AI-generated voices, ensuring they capture the depth and realism of human performances. This way, we ensure that every piece of content feels as genuine and impactful in its localized form as it does in the original.
Linguists and voice professionals play a key role in this process, as they enhance the cultural accuracy of AI-generated content. As globalization continues to shape the future of entertainment, the integration of AI with human artistry will become the gold standard for content localization.
Additionally, our Voice Artist Royalty Program compensates professional voice actors whenever their voices are used in AI-assisted dubbing, ensuring ethical use of voice AI technology.
How does Deepdub’s proprietary eTTS™ (Emotion-Text-to-Speech) technology improve voice authenticity and emotional depth in dubbed content?
Traditional AI-generated voices often lack the subtle emotional cues that make performances compelling. To address this shortfall, Deepdub developed its proprietary eTTS™ technology, leveraging AI and deep learning models to generate speech that not only retains the full emotional depth of the original actor’s performance but also integrates human emotional intelligence into the automated process. This advanced capability allows the AI to finely adjust synthesized voices to reflect intended emotions such as joy, anger, or sadness, resonating authentically with audiences. Additionally, eTTS™ excels in producing high-fidelity voice replication, mimicking natural nuances in human speech such as pitch, tone, and pace, essential for delivering lines that are genuine and engaging. The technology also enhances cultural sensitivity by adeptly adapting outputs to control accents, ensuring the dubbed content respects and aligns with cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its global appeal and effectiveness.
One of the common criticisms of AI-generated voices is that they can sound robotic. How does Deepdub ensure that AI-generated voices retain naturalness and emotional nuance?
Our proprietary technology utilizes deep learning and machine learning algorithms to deliver scalable, high-quality dubbing solutions that preserve the original intent, style, humor, and cultural nuances.
Along with our eTTS™ technology, Deepdub’s innovative suite includes features like Voice-to-Voice (V2V), Voice Cloning, Accent Control, and our Vocal Emotion Bank, which allow production teams to fine-tune performances to match their creative vision. These features ensure that every voice carries the emotional depth and nuance necessary for compelling storytelling and impactful user experiences.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen increasing success of our solutions in the Media & Entertainment industry, so we recently decided to open access to our Hollywood-vetted voiceovers to developers, enterprises, and content creators with our AI Audio API. Powered by our eTTS™ technology, the API enables real-time voice generation with advanced customization parameters, including accent, emotional tone, tempo, and vocal style.
The flagship feature of our API is the audio presets, designed based on years of industry experience with the most requested voiceover needs. These pre-configured settings enable users to rapidly adapt different content types without requiring extensive manual configuration or exploration. Available presents include audio descriptions and audiobooks, documentary or reality narration, drama and entertainment, news delivery, sports commentary, anime or cartoon voiceovers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), as well as promotional and commercial content.
AI dubbing involves cultural and linguistic adaptation—how does Deepdub ensure that its dubbing solutions are culturally appropriate and accurate?
Localization isn’t just about translating words – it’s about translating meaning, intent, and cultural context. Deepdub’s hybrid approach combines AI-driven automation with human linguistic expertise, ensuring that translated dialogue reflects the cultural and emotional nuances of the target audience. Our network of localization experts work alongside AI to ensure that dubbed content aligns with regional dialects, expressions, and cultural sensitivities.
What are the most exciting innovations you are currently working on to push AI dubbing to the next level?
One of our biggest upcoming innovations is Live/Streaming Dubbing, which will enable real-time dubbing for live broadcasts like sporting events and news media, making global events instantly accessible. By combining this with another of our exciting innovations, our eTTs™ feature, a proprietary technology that allows for the creation of human-sounding voices from text at a large scale and with full emotional support and commercial rights built in, we are going to be able to offer high quality, authentic, emotive, live dubbing unlike anything on the market.
Take the opening ceremonies of the Olympics or any live sporting event, for example. While local broadcasters typically provide commentary in their regional language and dialect, this technology will allow viewers from around the world to experience the full event in their native language as it unfolds.
Live dubbing will redefine how live events are experienced around the world, ensuring that language is never a barrier.
AI-generated dubbing has faced criticism in certain projects recently. What do you think are the key factors driving these criticisms?
The main criticisms stem from concerns over authenticity, ethics, and quality. Some AI-generated voices have lacked the emotional resonance and nuance needed for immersive storytelling. At Deepdub, we’ve tackled this by developing emotionally expressive AI voices, ensuring they retain the soul of the original performance. Deepdub has achieved over 70% exceptional viewer satisfaction across all dimensions, including superb casting, clear dialogue, seamless synchronization, and perfect pacing.
Another issue is the ethical use of AI voices. Deepdub is a leader in responsible AI dubbing, pioneering the industry’s first Royalty Program that compensates voice actors for AI-generated performances. We believe AI should enhance human creativity, not replace it, and that commitment is reflected in everything we build.
How do you see AI dubbing changing the global entertainment industry in the next 5-10 years?
In the next decade, AI-powered dubbing will democratize content like never before, making films, TV shows, and live broadcasts accessible to every audience, everywhere, in their native language instantly.
We envision a world where streaming platforms and broadcasters integrate real-time multilingual dubbing, removing linguistic barriers and allowing stories to travel further and faster than traditional localization methods have allowed.
Beyond language accessibility, AI dubbing can also enhance media access for the blind and visually impaired. Many rely on audio descriptions to follow visual content, and AI-dubbing allows them to engage with foreign-language content when subtitles aren’t an accessible option. By breaking both linguistic and sensory barriers, AI-powered dubbing will help create a more inclusive entertainment experience for all, which is especially critical as new regulations around media accessibility are coming into effect this year worldwide.
What are some of the biggest challenges that still need to be solved for AI dubbing to become truly mainstream?
The biggest challenges are maintaining ultra-high quality at scale, ensuring cultural and linguistic precision, and establishing ethical guidelines for AI-generated voices. However, beyond the technical hurdles, public acceptance of AI dubbing depends on trust. Viewers need to feel that AI-generated voices preserve the authenticity and emotional depth of performances rather than sounding synthetic or detached.
For AI dubbing to be fully embraced, it must be high quality by combining human artistry and technology at scale and also demonstrate respect for creative integrity, linguistic nuance, and cultural context. This means ensuring that voices remain true to the original actors’ intent, avoiding inaccuracies that could alienate audiences, and addressing ethical concerns around deepfake risks and voice ownership.
As AI dubbing becomes more widespread, technology providers must implement rigorous standards for voice authenticity, security, and intellectual property protection. Deepdub is actively leading the charge in these areas, ensuring that AI voice technology enhances global storytelling while respecting the artistic and professional contributions of human talent. Only then will audiences, content creators, and industry stakeholders fully embrace AI dubbing as a trusted and valuable tool.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Deepdub.
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