Proprietary video teleconferencing platform recently announced that it's acquiring a company known as Kites (short for Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), which has worked on creating real-time translation and transcription software.
According to Mashable, Zoom said that the acquisition is a move to help it make communicating with people who speak different languages easier and that it's looking to add translation capabilities to its video conferencing app. The company's site tells Kites began at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and its technology was originally developed to act as an in-classroom translation for students who needed help understanding the English or German their professors were lecturing in.
Zoom already has real-time transcriptions, but it's limited to people who are talking in English. On a support page, Zoom also makes it clear that its current live transcription feature may not meet certain accuracy requirements.
As per Mashable, the company has said that it's considering opening a research centre in Germany, where the Kites team will be staying.
Facebook launches newsletter platform Bulletin
Facebook has launched a new service, called Bulletin, that will allow writers to publish free and paid newsletters that can be posted to the web, sent to subscribers' inboxes, and shared across Facebook. As per Mashable, announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg via Facebook's Live Audio Rooms on Tuesday, Bulletin is a set of publishing and subscription tools aimed at independent writers in the US. The new service offers each user their own standalone website with a customisable name, logo and colour palette, and tools enabling them to embed media into their posts and style them as they please. On the distribution side, the most interesting bit is integration with Facebook Pages, and the fact that the work Bulletin writers do will be eligible for distribution in Facebook News. "The goal here across the company is to support people making a living doing creative work," Zuckerberg said in the audio call announcing the news. He added, "We're trying to elevate and support those writers and creators who are already producing high-quality work...[I think Bulletin] can be another great tool for writers and creators to have in their toolbox."
Initially, Facebook has launched Bulletin for a small group of creators. The full list of writers who participated in the launch included Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Wells, Erin Andrews and Adam Gran.
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