How Camb.ai is breaking language barriers with AI

Camb.ai is on a mission to disrupt the dominance of English in global media. Founded in 2022, the AI-powered platform specializes in real-time translation that retains a speaker’s emotional resonance—processing content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing services.

Major League Soccer now uses Camb.ai’s technology for live broadcasts. But the company has also found unexpected demand in markets like video advertising and the localization of interactive smart toys.

To power its growth, Camb.ai has raised $15.5 million to date. The platform now supports translations in more than 150 languages—including Maleku, spoken by just 500 people.

CEO Avneesh Prakash, who previously helped build India’s Aadhaar biometric ID system used by more than a billion people, cofounded the company with his son, Akshat Prakash. The younger Prakash, Camb.ai’s CTO, is a computer scientist and former AI/ML engineer on Apple’s Siri team.

Avneesh Prakash envisions a future where English is no longer the default language for media production—and where global audiences can access any content, in any language, on demand.

Fast Company spoke with Prakash about AI’s potential to reshape global media, the complexities of preserving emotional nuance across languages, and why rare languages remain central to Camb.ai’s mission.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What misconceptions do people have about AI voice technology, and how do you address those concerns?

People are concerned about inaccuracies when using AI, but they often overlook that even human translators have flaws. When evaluating AI, people try to find that moment of “Oh, it went wrong there.” Often these are subjective opinions, and such analyses do not use a comparative benchmark of how human translators would do on the same piece. The best approach is to enable human translators with AI like ours so they can be 50 times more productive and help cover a large body of work that today remains locked up in one to two languages, like English.

What metrics do you use to measure success beyond traditional business growth indicators?

One way we measure success is the number of languages we can translate into. Our mission is to redesign the internet for speakers of every language. That’s why we’ve also put a lot of effort into our capability to translate rare or endangered languages like Icelandic or Indigenous languages like Maleku. We already support more than 150 languages for speech-to-speech translation and our goal is to grow this number three to four times over the next two years.

What advantages do you have in competing against large tech players and giant AI companies, and what are the biggest hurdles for you to overcome? 

Compared to the household names in AI, we can make models that are hyperfocused on being the best at translation and dubbing. We are also focused on the open-source community and can use its feedback to iterate and develop faster. 

The biggest challenge we face is one plaguing the entire AI industry: access to the computing power necessary to continue innovating. To remain competitive, we have prioritized building smaller models capable of being run on a user’s device, rather than the race to the biggest model in Big Tech. 

Your recent partnership with Legible focuses on books. What other content types present the most compelling opportunities?

One unexpected opportunity we’re capitalizing on is translating advertisements (both picture and video). With traditional translation tools, it’s very difficult to translate ads in a way that makes sense culturally. A lot of advertising relies on metaphors, analogies, and cultural references. In the past, if you were to translate ads directly, a lot of the context would get lost in translation. Our models can overcome that hurdle. 

What do you envision happening to translators as AI dubbing technology advances?

I envision a future where content creators and translators work alongside AI rather than work against it. AI will be able to provide a “first draft” translation, but there will always be scenarios (especially in literature and poetry) where a human touch is needed.

What’s a common assumption about the future of global content that might be flawed?

Most people assume content will continue to be English-first. While a majority of the global content is currently produced in the U.S., in English, with demographic and technology shifts, I see a future where a majority of the world’s media is originally produced in languages other than English.

Which unexpected industries or sectors have shown the most interest in your technology?

One interesting use case has been in the smart toy industry, where more and more toys are becoming interactive and AI-enabled. Localization in this context has the incredible potential of teaching children their own culture and language; this gets increasingly lost in the modern world.

Looking ahead five years, what do you expect to be the most significant change in how we consume cross-language content?

We will see all content available in all languages. If you go on Netflix or YouTube right now, you’ll see some content being translated or captioned into a limited number of languages. In less than five years, I expect we will be able to view that same content in tens or hundreds of languages on demand. 

How does AI-powered dubbing/live translation fundamentally change the economics of global content distribution compared to traditional methods?

With AI translation, markets and audiences that were previously considered financially unviable now become accessible.

AI translation rapidly increases the speed at which content can be spread around the world. We’ve seen our technology dub content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing agencies, so content can be released worldwide simultaneously.

Beyond cost savings, what unexpected benefits do you see for AI live translations?

Certain cultures have populations greater than that of the U.S. For example, the number of Bengali speakers is larger than the populations of many countries combined. In many such cultures, sports/content/media has the opportunity to reach everybody and unlock a new generation of accessibility and viewership for businesses.

Critics argue AI-dubbed content lacks the “soul” of human performance. How do you address this perception, technically and philosophically?

With our models, preserving emotion and “soul” has been the number-one priority. By training our models on both text and raw audio, the model learns how different words, punctuation, and context relate to various emotions and expressions. 

For us, translation is a way to share human expression across cultural boundaries, and ensuring that we maintain the emotional meaning of speech is the essence of what we do.

Camb.ai’s mission is to let “every story be told in every language.” How might this reshape cultural power dynamics? Could a Gambian filmmaker compete more effectively against someone benefiting from Hollywood’s global influence?

Exactly. That’s our vision. As technology like ours becomes more pervasive, I expect to see content that “breaks the internet” coming from all corners of the globe. 

Major League Soccer used Camb.ai to live-dub commentary into four languages simultaneously. Is sports broadcasting reaching a linguistic tipping point?

Prior to MLS using our technology, there was very little appetite for using AI in a livestream context. This milestone has led to AI being considered a viable alternative for commentary and dubbing, and we’re now seeing more and more global sports organizations adopt the technology.

What’s your mission in competing in this ultra-competitive AI arena?

The internet was made for English speakers, and we decided to redesign it for the world. While language is a tool of diversity and hence evolution, it is also a tool of exclusion.

I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the good fortune of going through an English-language education. I’m grateful for that, but I also see the unfairness of that. We created a company to disrupt that disparity. As noted in the film Ratatouille, “Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere.” We are trying to create a world where a great artist born anywhere, creating anywhere, is able to take their content to any other part of the world.

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