Voice clone start-up Verbalate off to pitch Singapore investors at Super AI

An Australian AI start-up that can voice clone people from videos and translate them in up to 40 languages has been short-listed in a start-up pitch competition in Singapore.

Aussie AI start-up Verbalate will fly to Singapore on Sunday to pitch investors at Super AI conference. Picture: AFP

A Melbourne start-up that can voice clone videos and translate them in up to 40 languages has set off to Singapore to pitch its Australian invention to major Asian and international investors.

Verbalate was founded last year by Grant Davies, who happened upon the idea while listening to an episode from the Joe Rogan podcast with popular YouTuber Mr Beast. Mr Beast told listeners he used a team of hundreds of people in Mexico to dub his videos in other languages.

“I figured, I’m pretty sure I could do that with AI, so I designed the product pipe,” Mr ­Davies said.

Verbalate is one of 10 start-ups, chosen from 700 applicants, that will pitch investors and judges at the SuperAI conference in the Lion City, all for $100,000 worth of AWS credits.

It has just reached 15,000 users, having translated about 30,000 minutes worth of video – the average video on the platform is three minutes long – for university professors through to YouTube content creators and even a Ukrainian soldier.

The 40 available languages include Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Japanese, Malay and Korean.

Verbalate found and chief executive Grant Davies.

Verbalate’s pitch comes as scams leveraging AI-generated video are booming, with one ­notorious case in Hong Kong involving a finance worker transferring $HK200m ($38.5m) to various accounts. She had been deceived by an AI-generated deep fake video of her company’s chief financial officer.

Local cases are also affecting Australian workers, with WiseTech billionaire boss Richard White confirming his staff members were now fielding calls from AI-generated deep fakes of him asking them for money.

Social media platforms are also attempting to take action, with platforms including Meta announcing they would begin to penalise users who uploaded AI-generated content and failed to disclose its origins.

Meta announced in February it would pool resources with other tech companies so that it could identify AI-generated content faster and with better accuracy on its platforms, a decision that comes amid rising copyright and fake news concerns.

Asked about his concerns on the unethical use of voice cloning technology, Mr Davies said: “It’s definitely an issue, but at the end of the day it does come down to the user.

“This technology is available in multiple other places for free ­anyway so even if we weren’t to exist, it would still happen.”

Verbalate was watermarking content made on its platform so social media giants could identify that it had been altered or generated with AI, Mr Davies said.

But there was still no way for the platform to stop people from uploading the videos of others and translating their content into other languages for now.

One method of preventing that in future would be through a model in which people were able to verify themselves and their image, but it’s a job that would be too hard for small players and one that companies such as Meta would be more capable of, Mr ­Davies said.

The Super AI event has drawn some of the world’s top AI talent in recent years, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. This year speakers include Microsoft chief technology officer Mark Souza and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The real prize for Verbalate was a dinner before the event with other start-ups in the competition and investors, Mr Davies said, adding that he believed his start-up had been largely looked over by Australian venture capital funds.