← B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#43: Localizing video using AI with Guy Piekarz from Panjaya
00:22:08
Most brands invest heavily in content creation, but how much of that content actually reaches global audiences in a way that feels authentic? With 94% of B2B buyers saying they are more likely to engage with leadership and conference videos in their...
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- [00:00]
T-Mobile Advertiser
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- [00:30]
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- [01:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech marketing operations and CX, bestselling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
- [01:34]
Host
Most brands invest heavily in content creation, but how much of that content actually reaches global audiences in a way that feels authentic? With 94% of B2B buyers saying they're more likely to engage with leadership and conference videos in their local language, companies are missing a massive opportunity. How can AI powered video localization remove barriers, preserve cultural nuance, and make video content truly global? Joining me today is Guy Picars, CEO of Pangaya, a company revolutionizing video localization with AI driven Deep real technology that provides seamless lip syncing and natural dubbing across multiple languages. Panjaya is already working with global leaders like Ted and JFrog, helping brands expand their international reach. Guy, welcome to the show.
- [02:23]
Guy Picars
Thank you. Happy to be here.
- [02:25]
Host
Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you start by giving us a little more background on yourself and what led you to found Panjaya?
- [02:34]
Guy Picars
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that from the first job out of college, I'VE been working in the video space. Early days of interactive, personalized video storytelling. And then I run a company called Unisphere, which we did virtual conferences for about 10 years. Then afterwards, video discovery at Matcha, that turned to be the foundation of the new Apple TV and we did this for about 10 years. So as much as I wanted to escape video, video has been chasing me my whole life and that's probably my destiny. So at Apple, I experienced firsthand the complexity involved in time to market for original programming. Also coupled with this old paradigm of how the dubbing is solved and this problem can be solved, time to market and quality will lead to better engagement and smart distribution. So realizing this firsthand, being in the video space for so long with this, the realization of AI and new models just made it so clear and natural that this should be the next level of, of video and AI helping distribution.
- [03:43]
Host
Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, yeah. And so, you know, to that point, and then kind of how I intro the show. Let's talk a little bit about the future of AI and specifically in video localization. So demand for localized content is huge, yet brands are still overlooking it. Why do you think that video localization is so underutilized?
- [04:09]
Guy Picars
I think for starters, it's. It's starting with awareness and what's possible today. You know, somewhat there's also fear of AI, which is diminishing by the day. But I would say most likely the, the quality of automated video localization powered by AI is, is a fairly new space. And, and just now we believe that we reached the threshold to making it from a, a cool new thing to something that is really in high quality and effective for businesses. And the one great example is all the work we're doing with TED for their perspective is they did not move into the space until they found the right partnership that can create the quality that meets their audience demand.
- [04:57]
Host
So what are some of the biggest barriers that companies are facing? Even if they understand that, you know, the opportunity there, you know, what are some of the barriers that they're facing?
- [05:10]
Guy Picars
I would say that first and foremost is, is having people speak the language for the QC purposes. And I'll explain. While automation does 80% of the job, brands will still like to verify and QC the content before it's being delivered and associated with their brand to their audiences. And just having the right people in place with the right workflows in practice is just something that's evolving and improving by the day. But first and foremost, they need to have the talent on staff. Ideally, they'll be able to provide this additional service for them. In other cases, it's just a matter of how do we actually do that? What do we need to do? Is this a service? It's just all pretty new and it's getting better, but we're trying to help them to understand that.
- [06:08]
Host
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, putting, putting myself in their shoes, it would be like, okay, well, you know, we did it, you know, we did a video, we wrote a script in a language, you know, and in the language that we speak or whatever, the people on the, on the marketing team, let's say, got the, got the voiceover or something like that. And then trying to think through to your point, like, okay, well, who do we know that speaks this other language or these 10 other languages? So, you know, certainly this, this sounds like a great use for AI, Right. So, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, how, how does an AI powered solution step in here where, you know, some people might have been traditionally thinking about, you know, getting multilingual VO people or things like that to do some of this work? How does AI in your solution help in this area?
- [07:01]
Guy Picars
It automates the majority of the work in a very simple solution. You upload your video, select languages, and the platform takes, takes care of the rest while giving you control over script, translation and audio performance. So the result is you have a much faster and cheaper solution than traditional dubbing and it produces better results where AI and the innovation today enables you to take care of sync and authenticity, which creates a more engaging experience.
- [07:34]
Host
So some of the traditional ways of doing this video dubbing, closed captioning, have been kind of those traditional solutions, as you kind of mentioned as an alternative there. But what are kind of the biggest drawbacks of those more traditional approaches?
- [07:51]
Guy Picars
So let's start with traditional dubbing. It's expensive and the turnaround time is really high. So that on itself is a big barrier and many brands will just skip this altogether. And while there is entertainment content that requires to be dubbed, the results just look like dubbed content. The way we, we always perceive that content lacking authenticity and lacking the sync and personality in many cases of the original acting. Now, to have captions, caption has been there for a long time. They lack the emotive power and they can be distracting. So while it's become table stakes and people just do that because it's easy, it's not necessarily actually provides a solution where it lifts engagement and creates truly compelling stories told in other languages. So I would say these are the main drawbacks of current solutions.
- [08:52]
Host
Yeah, and kind of building on that, you know, beyond teams thinking about, you know, purely just translation to, you know, to build on that, you know, how do you ensure that cultural nuances or emotional tone kind of related to what you just said are preserved in AI localized content?
- [09:14]
Guy Picars
Yeah, that's a big challenge. And this is one of the challenges that we're tackling is we're constantly working on improving the way we capture the original performance, preserving it as much as possible and adapting it. So we track nuances like pauses and then we recreate them in the target language, Truly maintain and capture the performance as much as possible. And that's something that we're constantly working and improving and iterating on to make the authenticity of the original performance as good in the target language.
- [09:55]
Host
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, with that, I mean, it sounds like that I would imagine is a continual, you know, effort to improve and everything. What's the role of human oversight in not only improving those things, but ensuring quality, authenticity, all of those kinds of things. So how does human oversight work together with AI?
- [10:20]
Guy Picars
So in our case, we created a pretty advanced human and loop tool where allows them to review the output and they can control the script, control translation, and even deal with performance tuning. So they can insert pauses and make changes and adaptations in a way that they feel the target performance mimics as much as possible, the original one. And we're working on empowering, let's call it, the creators and reviewers with as many tools as possible to augment A, wherever AI falls short, and B, to integrate their creative act, which by definition translation is a creative act. So you want to give them as much freedom as possible.
- [11:07]
Host
Well, that's a great segue to the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is AI in the creative process. And there's certainly a lot of people, there's a lot of fear around AI, but one of the fears is that AI is going to replace human creativity. Not just the jobs and creativity, but the, you know, we lose something if we lose. If we lose some of the creative output, of course. But others argue, you know, that I can actually enhance it. And I'm on that side. I'm more on the optimistic side, I guess you could say of things. But how do AI tools like Pangaea complement the creative process rather than replace it?
- [11:53]
Guy Picars
So Panjaya is not a video generation solution. We take existing performances with all its creative elements and automatically adopts it to speak to more audiences. So we're taking everything you've been investing into the craft that you invested into the original art and we're just helping you automate the process to make it available to a larger set of audiences. And in adaptation process, we automate all the boring and tedious tasks, allowing them in the loop to really apply additional creativity on the adaptation versus replacing them. So in general, I would say in video adaptation we're leveraging the original creativity, giving you more tools to make it even more creative. But also we're not replacing anything that you would put into all the craft you would put into the original performance.
- [12:58]
Host
Yeah, yeah. I mean in essence you're creating a broader audience for the creative product. Right.
- [13:05]
Guy Picars
And giving you more time to spend on the creative ideas versus do all the operational tasks that are, I would say, more boring and tedious that AI can help you automate.
- [13:18]
T-Mobile Advertiser
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- [13:48]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [14:07]
Guy Picars
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- [14:11]
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- [14:15]
Guy Picars
Taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com yeah yeah, absolutely.
- [14:19]
Host
So are there particular industries or use cases or things that stand to benefit the most from AI powered video localization?
- [14:29]
Guy Picars
I think anything where content is in the center. So absolutely Media entertainment. These are two areas where reaching global audience today when they go to traditional dubbing. We believe that we're talking about the lack of efficiency, the cost saving and the time to market and the quality of the output. And then there is all the audiences which we call them more in the latent demand side of things where they wouldn't have done that otherwise. So it's about your marketing and advertising. Think about global campaigns. Avoid reshooting after you've spent so much time creating this ad. And something we see that's very popular today, influencers based ads. After testing this with our partners, they've seen that influencer based ads perform better after localized by Panjaya in their target market versus the original ads with captions which is actually, if you think about it makes a lot of sense. But we believe that this is only possible if it reaches this threshold of quality that puts the audience at ease and it doesn't feel fabricated or generated for them. So it feels authentic enough to create that reaction of engagement that you would see that it's useful more than any other solution. I would add to that training and education also very big verticals that will benefit from that. Some examples we have healthcare training and continuous medical education. We see content that is being delivered pretty. The content which is very professional and very terminology heavy. Being able to transfer this properly to other languages, especially where they're non speaking English countries or English is not their native language has performed way better than the original language in English plus captions. So there's a lot of good signs where with a high quality adaptation you get better performance than all the alternatives today.
- [16:48]
Host
Yeah, yeah. Have you seen any unexpected use cases for this technology?
- [16:55]
Guy Picars
Yeah, actually, in fact there is. We have a market research company that they're using this in a way that we even thought about what they do. They do the interview local people in remote countries about their. Their specifically in this case about their food taste or affinity to, to spicy food and what they were doing in the past. They would capture this locally and then bring translators or translate the content and they would use the content for their market research as a market research finding. But they lacked all the human performance. When people are actually talking about this with their passion and their intention that completely went away. So they've been using this to capture these, these talks locally, transfer and translate this in the original intent to the target language where the researcher can actually process the data and generate some findings.
- [17:52]
Host
Yeah, that's great. Wow. So let's talk a little bit about the future here and what you're seeing. What you know, having, having worked on this and continuing to work on it, what does the future of video localization look like in, you know, let's just.
- [18:09]
Guy Picars
Say five years on five years. It's. It's a long time. Okay.
- [18:13]
Host
We can, we can scale it back a little bit. Yeah, totally.
- [18:16]
Guy Picars
Yeah, totally. Many things will change in five years. But the way I see the future of this is starting with high quality one click translation or any video no matter if it's a how to movie customer testimonial, Hollywood movie ad, social media podcast, within one click you can translate the video while preserving the original performance and intent and messaging in high quality way. And I would say that some layers on top of it is getting into close to the real time translations and furthermore personalization. So you would record your video or create your video in one language in one way, but you'll be able to personalize the output in a very automated way where everyone will have their message resonates with them very personally.
- [19:11]
Host
Yeah, yeah. That might take five years, but I love that. That's great. Do you see with not only the customers that you're currently working with but, but talking with others, do you see localization becoming a must have rather than a nice to have for global brands?
- [19:32]
Guy Picars
Absolutely. You know, if you want to reach audiences hard, there is this famous Nelson Mandela quote says goes like if you talk to a man in language he understands that goes to his head. But if you talk to him in a language in his language it goes to his heart. And we believe that we're seeing people even though English in our, in our world is, is a global language, people resonate, they want to hear and they want to listen and they want to watch things in their own native language. And that becomes as the barrier to entry for brands and content creators lowers, is going to become just like any other activity they do today.
- [20:19]
Host
Yeah. Yeah. What's your advice for marketing and content leaders looking to make their video content more globally accessible today? Like where, where should they start and you know, any, any anything they should avoid.
- [20:34]
Guy Picars
So I think if you want to start and anything you want, you start with, you want and test, you want to make it be successful. So you know, start where you know where there's a specific use case that you know you can wrap your head around. How can I measure an ROI in this case? And if ROI has engagement. So make sure that you, there's a certain area where that you're, you know how to measure it, you know where you have gaps today. And I would even say look at areas where language is a barrier and you can currently either see low engagement or you're doing a solution that is just subpar or more expensive and complicated for you. But just think about the use case and then from the use case just drive back to how to actually do that. Yeah. Yeah.
- [21:24]
Host
Love it. Well Guy, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up, I'd like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [21:38]
Guy Picars
Yeah, I think you need to look at the end goal and think about where do you want to get with this and try to on one hand avoid some of the noise and the tactical interruptions. And while it's super important to listen and iterate, but still what really matters and prioritize short term versus long term, that feels like a big thing. That is part of kind of modus operandis. And I would say having a strong conviction on where you're going helps you to do that. But adaptability is important and that's around listening and iterating quickly. And last thing I would say is speed. So you know, embrace iteration and trying to adjust as quickly as possible. And I would say that there is here a little bit of this dichotomy where previously working at Apple creating products that are well thought, we ship only the third or fourth version when we feel it's really good and in a startup you want to ship early and iterate but at the same time we also want to stand for quality and make sure we ship is we managed to exceed the threshold of quality that will actually create adoption. So balancing between this quality and speed is a big thing that on a day to day conversation we're having is how to really optimize this.
- [23:17]
Host
Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Guy Picars, CEO of Pangaya, for joining the show. You can learn more about Guy and Panjaya by following the links in the show notes.
- [23:28]
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [24:08]
T-Mobile Advertiser
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- [24:39]
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- [25:08]
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