Meetween is a project funded by the European Commission with the mission to build the AI-based technology solutions needed to power the next generation of video conferencing platforms to support smooth, engaging and barrier-free collaboration across languages, geographies and time zones.
Meetween started in January 2024 and will receive a total of €7.1M of funding from the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme over the course of four years, lasting until the end of 2027. The project brings together a consortium of eight leading businesses and universities from across Europe and Türkiye comprising Translated (coordinator), Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Karlsruher Institut Für Technologie, ITUNOVA Teknoloji Anonim Şirketi, TAUS, Zoom Video Communications Germany, Pi School and Cyfronet.
Meetween aims at building foundational AI technologies that allow seamless integration of speech, text and video to support both individual and group video conference participants in different physical settings. These technologies will be designed to adapt nimbly to a meeting participant’s context as well as their regional and cultural specificities, including linguistic ones, but are also envisaged to have broader downstream commercial and scientific benefits.
As part of Meetween’s key commitments to the European Commission laid out in our roadmap, the consortium will develop and release three generations of a large multi-modal AI foundation model for speech, SpeechLMM, and a large, novel audiovisual speech dataset usable for varied research and commercial applications. Significantly, Meetween will release and licence these foundation models and datasets openly to the benefit of business, researchers and end users in Europe, the Republic of Türkiye and beyond.
Overall, Meetween seeks to foster and facilitate business collaboration throughout the European Union and Republic of Türkiye by providing real-time machine-learning-powered speech-to-speech translation and face dubbing, summarisation and virtual assistant services for online meetings. It seeks to do this whilst defending a European vision for AI with regard to safety, privacy, social and ethical approaches, anchored in Europe’s regulations, data standards and shared initiatives, and operationalised in engineering solutions.