Xl8

XL8 Inc. is a San Jose, California-based company that develops AI-powered machine translation (MT) technology specialized for media content and colloquial dialogue. Its engines are trained on what the company calls "Golden Data" — hand-curated, human-perfected subtitle and media translation data sourced from content producers — and are complemented by context awareness and multimodal translation that uses audiovisual cues such as apparent gender, age and speaker relationships to produce more conversational output. The company also offers personalized engines that can be tuned to individual customers, genres or recurring terminology, and states media-focused translation accuracy up to 40% higher than generally available MT services.

XL8 markets two core products. MediaCAT, launched in September 2022, is the company's media localization platform, organizing workflows into synchronization (speech recognition to generate subtitles and time codes), translation using media-specific training data, and dubbing. EventCAT covers live event interpretation and live subtitling, including an EventCAT app for Zoom released in the Zoom Marketplace in June 2023 that provides real-time interpretation for multi-language meetings across more than 20 languages. Additional capabilities cited by the company include in-line editing, automated media transcription with time coding, automated subtitling and synthesized voice dubbing, with API integration into third-party portals.

In 2023 XL8 extended beyond media and entertainment by acquiring American High-Tech Transcription and Reporting, Inc. (AHT), a provider of stenography, transcription and translation services for US government-related clients such as court hearings, depositions and law enforcement interrogations. XL8 stated it planned to work with AHT's human transcribers to improve its speech-to-text engine, which in turn feeds MT quality. CEO Tim Jung also became CEO of AHT, and CRO Josh Pine took the additional role of AHT president.