Forget Subtitles. YouTube Now Dubs (Some) Videos with AI-Generated Voices

An anonymous reader shared this report from the international tech news site Rest of World:In an open letter earlier this year, Neal Mohan, the recently appointed head of YouTube, made a pledge to creators that better translation tools were coming. Now, YouTube is delivering on that promise with Aloud - a free tool that automatically dubs videos using synthetic voices, raising creators' hopes and putting new pressure on dubbing firms that already cater to YouTubers. At the VidCon convention in late June, YouTube announced a pilot for Aloud. The tool first generates a transcription of a video's audio, which a creator can edit before selecting their preferred language and style of synthetic voice. The dub can take just minutes to generate. The pilot currently includes the option to dub videos into English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The company has said more languages are coming - likely including Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi, which are already advertised on the Aloud website. Hundreds of creators have already signed up to test the tool. "Our long-term goal is to be able to dub between any two languages, and as part of that goal we will continue to pilot and learn from dubbing content in different regions," Buddhika Kottahachchi, co-founder of Aloud and the recently appointed head of product for YouTube Dubbing, told Rest of World. "Helping a creator expand beyond their primary language can help them reach new audiences..." In the lead up to the pilot announcement, YouTube also released a new product feature that allows viewers to select between multiple dubbing tracks on a single video, similar to the current option for subtitles. Here's a video of YouTube's announcement, with five"audio tracks" (in different languages) available if you click the "gear" icon.While YouTube's top stars hire dubbing services, many smaller creators can't afford them, the article points out. "By offering Aloud for free, YouTube is setting up a new swath of creators to access dubs for the first time... "YouTube's new push into automated dubbing is a serious challenge for existing dubbing companies, which are now forced to compete with a free competitor built into the platform."

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