Antwerp & Hulshout, September 4th, 2025 – Faktion, a leading AI consultancy, and Belgian publishing-technology specialist Crius Group today announced a strategic collaboration to advance the CORE platform. This partnership combines over three decades of Crius Group’s content-production expertise with Faktion’s deep AI capabilities to deliver a fully automated, accessible, and scalable publishing solution.
Key Innovations
- Automated Content Structuring & Enriching
Faktion will deploy AI models to convert unstructured content such as Word files into structured formats (XML), while simultaneously enriching the text with metadata and annotations. This includes identifying characters, tagging dialogues, and preparing content for downstream tasks like audiobook generation. This results in seamless production of print-ready layouts, ePubs, audiobooks, and other digital formats with minimal manual effort. - Expert Validation Workflows
To ensure the highest accuracy and contextual fit, the solution also provides intuitive validation workflows for domain experts and publishers. These interfaces allow experts to review and confirm the AI-generated metadata and annotations, such as character identification, dialogue tagging, or accessibility descriptions, before final publication. This human-in-the-loop step guarantees both quality and trust in the enriched content. - Enhanced Accessibility
An AI-driven engine will process books to ensure compliance with the European Accessibility Act by generating alternative text (alt-text) and, where required, long descriptions for images, allowing visually impaired readers to receive rich contextual information. - Universal Translation
By leveraging the power of AI, Core will be enabled to translate books to any language while preserving formatting and metadata within the structured content (XML). Context-specific annotations added during the structuring phase enhance linguistic accuracy and stylistic consistency. - Multilingual Audiobook Production
Advanced text-to-speech capabilities will produce immersive audiobooks in multiple languages, featuring natural intonation, character-specific voices and emotions (depending on the context), chapter markers, and optional ambient effects for an engaging listening experience. - Future-Proof AI Playground
A dedicated AI playground gives Crius teams a hands-on environment to test different LLMs across translation, audiobook generation, and image alt-text generation using real data from production use cases. This allows Crius to do highly context-specific model benchmarking and prompt engineering and enables data-driven selection of the most effective and efficient AI solutions for every use case based on a variety of metrics, including accuracy, latency, and costs. - AI Capability Building & Empowerment
Beyond delivering new features, Faktion equips Crius teams with the knowledge and skills to manage, operate, and monitor these AI-driven workflows independently. This includes hands-on training in maintaining CORE’s AI functionalities, staying up to date with best practices and the state of AI, and building internal confidence to run and evolve the platform without external dependency.
Leadership Perspectives
By partnering with Faktion, we found a trusted AI partner who combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic, collaborative approach, enabling us to accelerate innovation in our CORE platform with confidence.
Jurgen Willems, Managing Director at Crius Group
Crius is at the midst of a major transformation in a publishing segment that is in full disruption. By combining their decades of domain expertise, entrepreneurial and no-nonsense mindset with Faktion’s AI engineering, we can move the needle beyond commodity solutions and build systems that truly stand out. Our role is not only to deliver technology, but to ensure Crius builds the internal AI capabilities to become self-sufficient and stay ahead of the curve.
Bart Baeyens, CEO of Faktion.
About Faktion
Faktion is an AI Product studio based in Antwerp, specialising in productising Generative AI and Industrial AI solutions for enterprise clients. The company’s mission is to empower business users to monitor, manage, and scale AI without specialised technical skills.
About Crius Group
Headquartered in Hulshout, Belgium, Crius Group has served the publishing industry for over 35 years. The firm offers comprehensive typesetting, editorial, and digital-media services and software solutions.
