YouTube to Improve Dubbing Capabilities
YouTube announced during VidCon 2023 that it will be working with Aloud to make dubbing videos easier for its creators.
Aloud offers YouTube creators the opportunity to reach a larger audience by providing a simple way to dub content in multiple languages. Aloud uses audio separation, machine translation, and speech synthesis to transcribe audio content, translate the content, and create a new audio track in a different language.
YouTube creators can either provide the script of their video content, or review and update the transcript provided by Aloud. If users choose the first option, Aloud will translate the content and users will have a chance to review and adapt the content before Aloud dubs the video for publishing.
Currently, Aloud works in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Amjad Hanif, VP of Product Management for Creator Products, announced at VidCon that more languages will be added without providing details on timelines. He also told the audience that YouTube will be “working to make translated audio tracks sound like the creator’s voice, with more expression and lip sync.”
The video streaming platform is currently testing Aloud with hundreds of creators, but will eventually release the tool more broadly. It is also investigating how GenAI capabilities could drive the creation of features like “voice preservation, better emotion transfer, and lip reanimation.”
Earlier this year, YouTube introduced multi-language audio track capabilities, which allowed users to publish videos in multiple languages that they dubbed themselves. As of June 2023, more than 10,000 videos have been dubbed in over 70 languages. Aloud takes this capability one step further by making dubbing easier.
Aloud is currently part of Google’s in-house incubator called Area 120. Created in 2016 by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Area 120 supports the creation of new products and services. In September 2022 and January of this year, Area 120 was severely affected by the layoffs at Alphabet. As a result, many of its projects have shut down.
