Though the expansion of AI-powered dubbing features has reached thousands of channels, they are still limited to the knowledge and information genre.
YouTube announced last year that it is testing an AI-powered automatic dubbing feature with a select cohort of YouTuber creators. In a recent update, YouTube announced that it is now expanding the AI-powered dubbing feature to hundreds of thousands of more creator channels.
The newly expanded feature is still in the early testing phase and is focused only on knowledge and information channels enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program. The company also assured that the auto-dubbing feature will expand to other types of content creator channels soon.
The dubbed content depends on the original audio language of the created content. If the original audio is in English, it can be automatically dubbed in French, German, Hindi, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Portuguese. But, if the original content belongs to any of the mentioned languages other than English, it will only be dubbed in English.
The company has not stated if these inter-translated dubbings will become more universal in later stages. In all the channels that received the AI dubbing feature, dubbed videos are created automatically when the original video is uploaded. Creators can either upload the video or choose to preview it before publishing. Even after publishing, creators will have access to unpublish or delete the dubs, as mentioned in the support document provided with the update.
Before users could criticize the new AI-dubbed audio, YouTube published a strong disclaimer justifying the discrepancies, if any. According to the tech giant, dubbed audios are not natural-sounding for now and are improving daily to reach a negligible distinguishable point.
“This technology is still pretty new, and it won’t always be perfect. We are working hard to make it as accurate as possible, but there might be times when the translation isn’t quite right, or the dubbed voice doesn’t accurately represent the original speaker,” cautioned YouTube in its official release note. The dubbed audio will keep getting better at emulating tone, emotion, and even the ambiance of the surroundings.
