Acquisition of IP of Papercup

Papercup's technology will allow RWS to optimise tone, pacing and accuracy to deliver scalable and brand-consistent video dubbing

RWS, a content solutions company powered by technology and human expertise, has acquired the intellectual property behind Papercup's breakthrough AI dubbing technology - known for its unique ability to reproduce a speaker's tone, pace and emotion faithfully.

The acquisition is a strategic step in RWS's wider plan to embed advanced AI across its technology stack, accelerating its ability to support clients with multilingual video, voice and content localisation across multiple formats and channels.

Papercup's technology combines state-of-the-art voice synthesis, thousands of unique AI voices and editorial tools for human language specialists to fine-tune the output - offering control and quality output comparable to human dubbing by actors and artists, at a fraction of the cost and turnaround time.

"The acquisition of Papercup's market-leading technology marks our intention to transform all forms of enterprise content, making it easier for businesses to connect to global audiences. RWS is well positioned to take this technology to its client base, given its trusted partnerships with over 80% of the world's top brands and ability to offer a broader range of content solutions." said Ben Faes, CEO of RWS. "Integrating this hybrid AI capability into our own solutions will enable us to capture the demand for scale and quality in this exploding multimedia content space."

Papercup's technology will now sit alongside RWS's existing suite of language technologies - including Language Weaver for neural machine translation and the Trados platform.

While AI-only dubbing tools often fall short on critical elements like timing, voice consistency, and speaker identification, RWS's hybrid approach puts humans in the loop to optimise tone, pacing and accuracy - enabling video dubbing that's both scalable and brand-consistent. In combination with access to RWS's 1,800 in-house linguists and a global network of over 40,000 language experts, this tool will enable enterprise client o unlock new value from video content that was once too expensive or complex to localise - from corporate communications and training to marketing and social media-related content.