YouTube has finally launched its artificial intelligence-supported automatic dubbing tool, which it announced about a year and a half ago. This innovation provides access to “hundreds of thousands” of YouTube Partner Program channels that produce content specifically focused on information and education. The company states that this feature will be available to a wider user base soon.
The new tool allows content creators to automatically dub their English videos into languages such as French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Likewise, videos in these languages can only be translated into English. The process is completely automated, and creators can preview dubbed versions of their videos before publishing them. Dubbed videos can be viewed in the “languages” section of YouTube Studio with the “automatic dubbing” tag.
YouTube shared three sample videos while introducing this new feature. One of them has been dubbed from French to English and the other has been dubbed from Hindi to English. Another video was in English and was presented with different dubbing options. English translations generated by artificial intelligence, while accurate, leave a rather mechanical impression. Users who reviewed the French dubbing also state that they had similar experiences.
However, in the examples shared by YouTube, dubbing was done only through narrative voices. Research to test this feature in scenes where people talk to each other was inconclusive. This suggests that AI-based dubbing may have difficulty in fast conversations or in situations where more than one person is speaking at the same time.
YouTube notes that this technology is still new and should not be expected to deliver a perfect result. The company continues to work to ensure that dubs better reflect the tone, emotion and ambience of the environment. Improvements in these areas are planned with future updates.
This development is considered as part of YouTube’s efforts to increase the global reach of content creators. The artificial intelligence-supported dubbing tool aims to make content reach wider audiences by overcoming language barriers. Especially for information and education-focused channels, this feature has the potential to expand the audience by making it easier to present their content in different languages.
YouTube’s artificial intelligence-supported automatic dubbing tool offers content producers the opportunity to translate their videos into different languages and reach a wider audience. Although there are some shortcomings since the technology is still in its development stage, it is expected that future improvements will provide more natural and fluent dubbing.