YouTube Expands AI-Powered Auto Dubbing Feature to Knowledge-Based Channels

YouTube is expanding its auto dubbing feature to knowledge and information-focused content, it announced on Tuesday. The video streaming platform first announced this feature at VidCon last year and it leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by Aloud — Google's in-house Area 120 incubator. As the name suggests, auto dubbing can automatically transcribe and translate YouTube videos from English to other dialects and vice versa, helping creators engage viewers who don't speak the same language by transcending language barriers.

Expansion of YouTube's Auto Dubbing Feature

YouTube detailed the expanded availability of its AI-powered auto dubbing feature in a blog post. The Google-owned platform says that hundreds of thousands of YouTube channels that are part of the YouTube Partner Program which focus on knowledge and information will be able to take advantage of this feature.

Creators who make videos in English can get them auto dubbed into French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Meanwhile, if the video is in any of the aforementioned languages, it will get dubbed into English. Videos dubbed using this feature will appear with a auto-dubbed label. Viewers can choose to listen to the original audio by using the track selector.

To use this feature, no special steps are required. Creators simply need to upload videos and YouTube will automatically detect its language and dub it in other supported languages. Dubbed videos can be viewed in the YouTube Studio in the Languages section. Creators will have control over the dub and they can choose to unpublish or delete dubs that are not up to their liking, as per the platform.

The company admits that there may be cases when the translation might stray a bit far or the dubbed voice does not match the original speaker. However, it emphasises that users can always submit feedback for the feature's improvement. It is working towards bringing more accurate, expressive, and natural speech in dubs via a feature called ‘Expressive Speech' that was previewed at the Made on YouTube event in September.