YouTube is now making its auto-dubbing feature available to whole lot of partner content creators, though currently limited to knowledge content. The AI-driven tool was initially launched in a limited capacity at VidCon last year, and aims to bridge language barriers by enabling creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos.
“Whether you want to learn to cook authentic gratin from a French chef, sew traditional clothes from an Indian seamstress, or scout spooky spots to visit in another country, auto dubbing makes that content more accessible. We’ve just made auto dubbing available to hundreds of thousands of channels in the YouTube Partner Program that are focused on knowledge and information and will expand to other types of content soon,” YouTube noted in a blog post.
The auto-dubbing feature leverages tech developed by Google’s DeepMind team, in order to streamline the translation process. When a creator uploads a video, the platform automatically detects the original language and generates dubbed versions in several supported languages. Supported languages include English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Creators are given the opportunity to review the dubbed versions before they are published, and this feature is now available to channels that provide informational content. If the original video is in English, the system translates it into the other supported languages. Conversely, if the video originates in one of these languages, YouTube produces an English-dubbed version.
This means that a cooking video originally filmed in English can now reach audiences in non-English-speaking countries such as France, India, Japan, and Indonesia. Similarly, a Hindi-language tutorial can now be made accessible to English-speaking viewers. Once the videos are dubbed, users will be able to find them in the “Languages” section in YouTube Studio (if you cannot find it, go to the Advanced Settings). Once a video has auto-dubbed content, it will display a new “auto-dubbed” label.
However, while the auto-dubbing feature has a lot of potential, it is not without its limitations. The feature is still in its infancy and may not always produce perfect results, and challenges include inaccuracies in translation or a lack of tonal nuance in the dubbed voices. For now, the company has included disclaimers on auto-dubbed videos to inform viewers that the translations were generated automatically and might not fully capture the original intent. To address these shortcomings, YouTube has committed to ongoing improvements. A major forthcoming update, dubbed “Expressive Speech,” aims to replicate not only the spoken content but also the creator’s tone, emotions, and environmental ambiance.
