CAMB.AI: The Dubai-Based Dubbing Startup Breaking Language Barriers

Dubai-based dubbing startup CAMB.AI is looking to break language barriers through its use of AI technology to dub content in real time. Founded in 2022 by Avneesh Prakash and his son Akshat Prakash, the startup is able to provide dubs in over 100 languages and dialects while maintaining original voices and emotions.

Akshat Prakash studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University before working at Apple. But it was his desire to focus on his interest and core research- speech and translation - that led him to launch CAMB.AI with his father.

“I think language as a barrier has existed for everybody, and anybody living in the Eastern hemisphere or outside of North America really understands what it means for language barriers to exist,” Akshat Prakash, CTO and Co-Founder at CAMB.AI, tells StartupScene. “My father grew up in India at a time when, because he knew English and some of his friends didn’t, he had a major advantage in the opportunities and the education he received. What’s ironic is that accessibility to content in alternative languages still remains as much of a barrier today.” 

CAMB.AI’s services have been used in several high-profile projects, including dubbing Emirati director Nayla Al Khaja’s film ‘THREE’ into Mandarin, which debuted at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah and was viewed by global audiences. Today, the startup aims to continue working with leading businesses in the sports and entertainment industry to expand its services in the region and across the globe. 

HOW IT WORKS

Unlike other startups and businesses, CAMB.AI has built its own machine learning models to translate content in real time. Rather than turn speech into text before translating it and turning it into text-to-speech, the startup created its own model from the ground up, known as MARS and BOLI. Through this model, speech is translated immediately while also maintaining the speaker’s voice and emotions. 

“We’re not a text-to-speech company, and we’re not a translation company,” Prakash explains. “We’re a company that does performance transfer cross lingually, and that’s kind of the core technology that enables us to do both on a platform level for VOD (video on demand) content, or shoulder content, where you can upload videos, dub them, get the output, and now you can also do it live streaming or use it through APIs (application programming interface).” 

This model was made possible through Prakash and his team’s experience and extensive research in AI. “It’s not like we’ve done this overnight. I’ve been researching this technology for over half a decade,” he says. “Our ground up machine learning models have been trained specifically for AI dubbing.” 

CAMB.AI is able to translate both popular and low resource languages, including Afrikaans, Malay and Icelandic, among others. 

HOMEGROWN IN THE UAE

One of the things that Prakash is most proud of is that the startup was born in the UAE. Although an emerging market, the UAE has been attracting the world’s attention not only in tourism, shopping, and real estate, but also in business and technology. 

Microsoft recently invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi’s G42, an AI firm that has built an Arabic language model known as Jais. The UAE also just released a new open source GenAI model, Falcon, which could rival the ones offered by big technology companies, demonstrating that it can be a major player in AI. 

For Prakash this is good news. He was able to get the support he needed to grow his startup through venture firms like Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF). “One of the reasons we've been able to grow so fast is because we were born in Dubai,” says Prakash. “The government here, through their venture arm DFDF, was one of our earliest backers, when nobody even had a conceptualization of what AI could do. This was all the pre-ChatGPT era, when people didn’t even really understand the power of AI.” 

Prakash adds that the government’s willingness to experiment and innovate enables AI and other technology-based startups to accelerate in the market. “You can almost consider them [the government] like a big startup which makes things move fast much quicker than they would be in certain other geographies,” he says. 

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES 

However, any new market also has its challenges. Finding talent and access to hardware were some of the main struggles that CAMBI.AI faced. As a result, the startup resorted to hiring both local and remote talent from across the globe, particularly those with a GST + or – 2 time zone difference. This enabled CAMB.AI to work with a diverse team from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia “It is a general challenge to attract talent, but this is true for any AI company,” says Prakash. “I think we are playing our part to really attract really good talent to Dubai.” 

Like talent, hardware is also not easily accessible. For startups, working with cloud providers can be expensive when training AI models. At the same time, buying hardware up front is a heavy investment that not many can undertake, depending on where they are on their startup journey. But for CAMB.AI, this is what it had to do to be competitive regionally as well as globally. 

“Access to hardware is the biggest challenge to any AI company,” says Prakash. “Access to enough GP computers, where we can actually train models in a cost-effective manner, is important. If you go to these cloud providers, they can usually charge about $100 or $200 an hour, which is not sustainable for a startup.” 

With the startup’s recent funding of $4 million earlier in 2024, it aims to fast-track development and global expansion, working with more businesses in the sports and entertainment industry. To date, CAMB.AI has worked with Major League Soccer, Tennis Australia, and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment to name a few. One of its most famous works was the dubbing of Novak Djokovic’s speech in Spanish during the Australian Open. 

Ultimately, however, Prakash wants to continue breaking barriers and stereotypes. “Nobody should be able to question where you can build a great AI company,” he says. 

He references a quote by Jan Pinkava from Pixar’s ‘Ratatouille’ that has stayed with him since childhood. “Not everybody can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere,” he says. “That’s been my personal life where I’ve grown up in places like Ghaziabad, where I didn’t even have half a day’s worth of electricity, to other places I’ve lived in like North America or Dubai. That is a central theme in my personal journey, in my father’s journey, and now in CAMB.AI’s journey.”