MyLingo is a smartphone app that enables non-English speaking film buffs to listen to a translation of the actors’ dialogue through their mobile device as they watch a mainstream English-language movie at the cinema.
The Los Angeles-based business was started in June 2012 by Olenka Polak and her brother Adam while she was still an undergraduate at Harvard University. The idea won the Ivy League college’s Innovation Challenge.
The inspiration was the problem their Polish-born parents faced of not being able to understand any of the English dialogue at the local cinema if they took their children to see a movie. The two founders estimate that 100m people around the world face a similar problem.
Film and television studios in the US already produce and own domestic and foreign-language audio tracks, so the audio files used by myLingo are readily available and excellent quality.
MyLingo uses audio recognition technology, signal processing and audio fingerprinting to play dubbed-language audio tracks in perfect sync with the action on screen and the original source soundtrack. Users can therefore enjoy the film as if it was made in their mother tongue, without the need for subtitles.
In June 2012 MyLingo secured $750,000 in angel funding and appointed Barclay Knapp, the former chief executive of NTL, the UK cable company, as chairman.
The hardest part for Ms Polak was telling her parents that she would be dropping out of Harvard and moving to Los Angeles to focus on the company. But it seems that they understood the message clearly: the technology they have found so useful has great potential.
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