Summary
- YouTube has rolled out a new AI-powered dubbing feature that automatically translates and dubs videos into multiple languages.
- Creators can review and publish these dubbed versions. Viewers can select their preferred language from the video’s settings.
- This feature expands the reach of content creators and makes YouTube a more inclusive platform.
Back in June of 2023, YouTube announced that it is testing out an AI-enabled dubbing feature to help users better understand videos with dialogue in a foreign language. Now, one-and-a-half years later, the feature is finally rolling out.
Powered by the team from Aloud, a dubbing service that began as an experiment under Google’s in-house Area 120 incubator, the AI tool aims to break language barriers when it comes to content, making videos with verbal dialogue in specific languages more accessible to the global audience.
Related
Google’s Area 120 wants to make it easy to dub videos into new languages
Easy as uno, dos, tres, catorce
The streaming giant highlighted the new feature in a blog post, highlighting three specific videos. One that’s been dubbed from French to English, one from Hindi to English, and one that is available in a total of nine languages, including English (original), Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, German, French, and Indonesian. It’s worth noting that the feature is available to all creators, it’s just that YouTube decided to highlight these specific videos. Of course, as you’d expect, the dubbed audio doesn’t lip-sync, but it still does a good enough job of accurately dubbing, even in cases of fast-spoken conversations, as highlighted in a separate cooking video that I found.
Automatic dubbing is currently available to some of your favorite creators that are part of the YouTube partner Program and make videos “focused on knowledge and information.” The streaming giant indicated that the feature will soon expand to other types of content soon.
How does it work?
For viewers, finding dubs is as simple as tapping on the cogwheel icon and looking for an “Audio Track” option. This denotes if the video is available to watch in more than one language. Another way to check is to expand the video’s description — if it has a dedicated section that reads “Auto-dubbed” under the “How this content was made” section, it means that the video is available in more than one language.
For creators, on the other hand, the dubbing process is completely automated — and it is going to be enabled for you by default. The streaming giant highlighted that creators can continue uploading their videos as usual, and YouTube’s AI tool will automatically generate dubbed versions for it. For reference, if your video’s original audio is in English, it will be dubbed into French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Alternatively, if your video is in any of the other mentioned languages, it will be dubbed into English. Creators then have the option to review the dubs within YouTube Studio, alongside an option to unpublish and delete certain or all dubs.
In the few examples shared by YouTube, the dubbed voice’s tonality accurately represents the original speaker, though the streaming giant warned that the technology is still nascent, and it might not always be perfect.
