Introductory Post

Hello World! And specifically, Hello You!

However you found us, wherever you’re from and whoever you are, welcome welcome welcome to the inaugural post of the Papercup technical blog!

Papercup is what we call ourselves; a small collection of human beings eager to build something new (often referred to as a startup). Our goal is to make the world’s video content watchable in any language. We do this by translating videos with an automatically generated voice that preserves the character and emotion of the original speaker. We have a machine learning team that builds and pushes the performance of neural text-to-speech models; a product team that transforms our core technology into a beautiful, useful and reliable tool; a customer team that bridges the gap between what we build and the people it serves.

We decided to start this blog as a platform to document and share our learnings, focussing on the technical aspects of our journey. Many of us would self-identify as creatures of learning, and this particular aspect is enhanced when we come together. Right from the early days, we’ve placed a special importance on the intrinsic value of learning. We do cycles of paper digests, paper clubs, showcases, technical sessions and what we call papercup university where we learn about all sorts, sometimes things unrelated to work (we most recently learned about sailing!). So it is in this curious and carefree learning spirit that we present this blog to you.

The authors are mainly from the machine learning and product teams. We don’t often write in our daily work, so this blog also serves as a creative outlet and medium for expression. There are no fixed themes for now, we’ll start off simply by sharing things we find useful, painful, beautiful - most likely all at once. We invite you to join us on this journey and hope you’ll find value along the way!