Eolia

Skironthe north-west wind

Ideas were never meant to have borders.

Eolia turns talks, podcasts and videos into natural versions in other languages. Each speaker keeps a voice of their own, and every line lands where it was spoken.

The islands where the winds were kept

In the Odyssey, Aeolus rules the winds from Aiolia, a floating island ringed with bronze. When Odysseus leaves, Aeolus seals the storms in a bag of ox-hide and sets the west wind blowing to carry him home.

38°15′ N38°30′ N38°45′ N 14°30′ E15°00′ E15°30′ E SiciliaCalabria Alicudi Filicudi Salina Lipari Vulcano Panarea Stromboli MILAZZO 10 km
The seven Aeolian Islands, a short crossing from Milazzo. Stromboli, top right, has been erupting for more than two thousand years.

Aiolia, off SicilyThe ancients placed Aeolus' island in the archipelago still called the Isole Eolie. Strabo writes that Aeolus foretold the winds by watching the smoke of Stromboli.

Born in MilazzoEolia was born in the Sicilian port that faces those islands. We take their name and do the same work for ideas: hold back the noise, and send each voice out on a favourable wind.

Our missionLet ideas cross languages the way they once crossed seas. Knowledge travels by speech: a lecture, an interview, a podcast. A brilliant engineer speaking in Mumbai is never heard in Osaka. That wall can come down.

Every great age was an age of translation

Follow one book. Ptolemy's astronomy crossed three languages in a thousand years, and each crossing lit up a new age of science.

Μεγίστη

Megistē, “the greatest”: what Greek readers called Ptolemy’s treatise on the stars.

  1. Alexandria, c. 150

    Μεγίστη

    In Greek

    Ptolemy writes his astronomy in the common tongue of the Mediterranean. Readers call it the greatest.

  2. Baghdad, 9th century

    المجسطي

    In Arabic

    At the House of Wisdom it becomes al-Majisṭī. Astronomers measure the sky again and improve its tables.

  3. Toledo, 1175

    Almagestum

    In Latin

    Gerard of Cremona translates the Arabic into Latin. Europe's universities teach from it for centuries.

  4. Now

    Ideas

    In every language

    The crossing that took centuries can take hours, and it is heard rather than read.

The next renaissance

Humanity thinks as a network. New ideas appear where minds meet, and the more freely ideas circulate, the more connections they make.

Today that network is cut into islands by language. A researcher in Seoul, a farmer in Kerala and an engineer in Lagos each speak to their own shore, and most of what humanity says out loud never reaches most of humanity.

Connect those islands directly, culture to culture, and the network does not grow by addition. It multiplies. That is the bet behind Eolia: the next renaissance will come from ideas crossing languages as easily as they now cross cables.

3,480possible exchanges

Eight languages, thirty people each. Inside their own languages those 240 people can form 3,480 pairs. Across languages, 28,680: the same people, more than eight times the exchanges.

  1. Cities that bring more people together produce more inventions per person, not only more inventions in total.Bettencourt et al., PNAS, 2007
  2. Across a million years of history, technology advanced faster as the population able to share it grew.Kremer, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993
  3. When rising seas cut Tasmania off from the mainland, its isolated population lost techniques its ancestors had used.Henrich, American Antiquity, 2004

From one recording to many languages

Audio or video, raw or edited, one speaker or several, a few minutes or more than an hour. Eolia proposes every choice along the way. You correct what you want.

  1. Import

    Drop in a podcast, a facecam video or a full edit. Separate tracks are welcome and never required.

  2. Listen and identify

    Eolia transcribes and punctuates the source, then works out who speaks when, from the voices and, on video, the faces.

  3. Translate to fit

    Each passage is translated to land in the time its speaker used, with idioms adapted instead of copied word for word.

  4. Cast the voices

    Every speaker gets a matching library voice, chosen by gender, age and timbre. Laughs, sighs and hesitations carry over.

  5. Review

    A studio shows each passage with the video. Reviewing a piece is designed to take less than ten minutes.

  6. Deliver

    Voice stems for your editor, a finished mix with the original music, a multilingual YouTube audio track and subtitles.

A ready-made harness, every option exposed

Any company going multilingual faces the same decisions. Eolia ships with good defaults and lets you set each one per piece, per language or per passage. Try a few and watch the project and its audio tracks change.

Target languages

Pick as many as you publish in.

How the original voice is treated

Replace it, keep it audible underneath, or let Eolia decide passage by passage from the video.

Voices

One voice per speaker, or a single neutral narrator.

Expression

Carry laughs, sighs and hesitations from the original into the new voice.

Deliverables
project.yaml2 languages

          
          

What Eolia will and won't do

No cloned voices

Eolia never copies anyone's voice, the speaker's included. Every voice comes from a licensed library and is cast the way a dubbing director would cast it.

A person has the last word

Everything is proposed automatically and everything stays editable: who speaks, how a passage is treated, how a name is pronounced.

Engines you can swap

Transcription, translation and speech run behind stable interfaces. When a better model ships, it plugs in without changing your workflow.

Built for anyone who publishes speech

Media and creators

Podcasts, interviews and YouTube channels with an audience at home that want one abroad.

Podcast, episode 42

Education and training

Courses, lectures and onboarding videos that should reach every learner in their own language.

Lecture 3, thermodynamics

Companies going global

Product launches, internal talks and webinars, released in every market on the same day.

Launch keynote

Set sail with us

Eolia is in private development and opening to a small group of publishers first. Tell us what you publish, in which language, and where you want to be heard.

[email protected]