Zoom acquires Kites, an AI company building real-time translation

Zoom has announced that it has acquired a startup called Kites (Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions). The startup has worked on making real-time translations more easier and convenient.

Kites was founded in 2015 and has academic roots with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where co-founders Dr. Alex Waibel and Dr. Sebastian Stüker are faculty members. Kites’ talented team of 12 research scientists will help Zoom’s engineering team advance the field of MT to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multi-language translation capabilities for our users.

Zoom Blog

Kites was founded in 2015 in Germany to help professors and students understand lectures in the German language. Zoom’s motive behind the acquisition is to help users communicate with people who speak different languages. The company has thought of building a research center in Germany to facilitate the Kites team.

Although Zoom already has an option for real-time translation, the feature is solely for English-speaking users. Zoom’s capital rose by approximately $1.47 billion due to the pandemic.