YouTube wants content creators to be able to expand their reach to new audiences without language being a barrier. For this reason, Google itself has announced, during its conference at VidCon, the arrival of automatic video dubbing backed by artificial intelligence, thanks to the latest advances made by Aloud, a group of engineers in charge of developing experimental projects.
The next time you go to watch a video from one of your favorite English-speaking creators on YouTube, it is likely that you will find a most peculiar novelty: an automatically generated Spanish language dubbing.
The AI-powered dubbing option on YouTube is being tested with "hundreds" of YouTubers, though no timeframe for a full-scale rollout has yet been mentioned, nor who is currently subjecting their content to this automated dubbing.
In fact, in October of last year, Linus Tech Tips began experimenting with offering their dubbed videos using Aloud's technology. The Canadian channel allowed its YouTube content to be viewed in Spanish, using an AI-generated voice that delivered a fairly neutral Latin Spanish dubbing. It wasn't perfect, but it showed a very interesting first step that hinted at a much broader market yet to be developed.
YouTube now plans to integrate Aloud's technology directly into its platform, so content creators can offer their videos in multiple languages without having to create separate channels or go through the costly process of hiring voice actors.
Aloud transcribes the video in question, and can then be reviewed and modified by the content creator, should any errors be detected in the speech-to-text conversion. The tool will then translate it and create dubbing that will be applied to the post in question as an additional audio track. When the review process is finished, Aloud translates and dubs the video into the different available languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese, for now), to finally publish it.
Once published on YouTube, the dubbing is completely "transparent" to the viewer: the audio of the video will be available in your preferred language, but you will always have the possibility to return to the original language through the video settings.
In addition, the creators themselves will be the ones who must choose whether or not their videos are dubbed into the different languages that are currently supported by Aloud.
Finally, by 2024 it is expected to make the dubbed tracks more similar to the original voices of the videos, or of the content creator, with more expressions and better synchronization.
