Anuja Dhawan: "Spanish is now the third most used language on our platform"

Anuja Dhawan is the founder of Dubverse, an AI-powered platform that is breaking down language barriers in the content economy. With Dubverse, Anuja and her team have created one of the first Indian platforms to launch fundamental text-to-speech (TTS) models in Indian languages, paving the way for the creation of studio-quality multilingual videos at scale.

What specific market need were you looking to fill when you founded Dubverse?
So basically, I come from India, specifically the north side of India, where primarily the language divide is very evident. We go to an English-medium school, but we come back home and start speaking in English. And with the advent of internet, cheap internet, specifically in India, we could see that everything is primarily English, but the other people getting on to the internet, they don't speak English as their first language.

So, we could see that white space, and with Varshul being my co-founder, he's been in technology for the longest time, so we saw that white space and we could see that that can be filled with technology. So enabling more people to access internet was the basic intent to set up Dubverse.

And which sectors are most rapidly adopting your solutions?
We've been at it for almost four years now. So initially, we've been called deepfake, we've been called synthetic media, and not been very sort of adopted by enterprises.

So we went to prosumers, people who are the most active on the internet. And with the creative wave sort of coming on to the internet, we've seen those are the ones which move the fastest. And as we all know, AI is still getting better.

They don't mind running with the 80%, whereas enterprises really want 100%. So now we've covered that transition from a prosumer to an enterprise, and we are focused on media and entertainment as a category.

What challenges have you faced in squaring your technology to multiple languages and cultures?
Language is very, very nuanced, right? When it comes to how it is spoken, what are the nuances I am sort of looking at from a cultural aspect, from an accent aspect, it becomes very specific.

So that's been the biggest challenge: how do we add the emotion? How do we make it more human? The last leg of it has been the biggest challenge, which primarily gets solved with better and higher quality data.

Is Dubverse already active in Spain? Or is this your first contact with the country?
Spanish actually is the third most used language on our platform already. And that's been because I think Spanish is the second most spoken language globally. And everybody who engages with the platform is, if they already have English, the first preference that they want to translate into is Spanish.

We already have some of the brands use us from Spanish, some of the startups, some of the media houses. And going forward and with this visit and the programme, which has been very helpful, we plan to go deeper within the language aspect.

Have you identified any opportunities to collaborate with companies and institutions during the programme?
Not companies directly yet, but today I definitely met a lot of interesting folks, which are primarily focused on building stronger relationships between India and Spain, and language is their first priority. So, there I could sense a lot of overlap in terms of the ecosystem that we are trying to build. And I am very hopeful that we'll be able to make it a great opportunity for both of us.

What would you highlight from everything we have done till today during the programme?
I think the highlight was the VR experience that we did. I think that was really fascinating. I have been hearing about it, have experienced it also with one of the Oculus locally in India, but did not see that it has reached such a level from a technology standpoint.

So that was very, very interesting. Apart from that, I think the Salamanca Tech event was very insightful for me, because it's more technology, there was a lot of AI conversations, and I really wanted to learn of how people are thinking about AI in Spain. So there's a lot of resonance that came out of that for me.

VIII edition activity summary