MBZUAI students Muhammad Taimoor Haseeb and Ahmad Hammoudeh have created Audiomatic, an AI-driven platform that automates audio tasks for visual storytelling and addresses licensing challenges. The platform allows users to upload videos and automatically find suitable audio elements, streamlining the content creation process. The MBZUAI Incubation and Entrepreneurship Center (IEC) is providing support to help commercialize the platform. Why it matters: This platform has the potential to significantly impact the content creation industry in the region by simplifying audio production and mitigating licensing issues, while also highlighting MBZUAI's role in fostering AI innovation and entrepreneurship.
ElevenLabs, a voice AI research and product company, presented at MBZUAI's Incubation and Entrepreneurship Center (IEC) on the adoption of audio AI in the Middle East. Hussein Makki, general manager for the Middle East at ElevenLabs, highlighted the potential of voice-native AI across sectors like telecommunications, banking, and education. ElevenLabs focuses on making content accessible and engaging across languages and voices through its text-to-speech models. Why it matters: This signals growing interest and investment in voice AI applications within the region, potentially transforming customer service and content accessibility in Arabic.
A new benchmark, LongShOTBench, is introduced for evaluating multimodal reasoning and tool use in long videos, featuring open-ended questions and diagnostic rubrics. The benchmark addresses the limitations of existing datasets by combining temporal length and multimodal richness, using human-validated samples. LongShOTAgent, an agentic system, is also presented for analyzing long videos, with both the benchmark and agent demonstrating the challenges faced by state-of-the-art MLLMs.
MBZUAI's Incubation and Entrepreneurship Center (MIEC), launched in November 2023, is fostering AI-driven startups, including LibrAI, Audiomatic, and Limb. LibrAI is an AI safety monitoring platform founded by MBZUAI postdoctoral researcher Xudong Han. Audiomatic, created by MBZUAI students Muhammad Taimoor Haseeb and Ahmad Hammoudeh, is an AI-powered audio integration platform. Why it matters: These startups demonstrate MBZUAI's role in translating AI research into practical solutions, contributing to the UAE's innovation ecosystem and addressing real-world challenges.