After a period of availability to a limited number of users, YouTube has announced the rollout of its autodubbing feature to a global audience. The aim is to make it easier to watch foreign language videos without the need for the creator to provide their own dubbing.
The company highlights a number of benefits of the various features it has to offer, for consumers and creators alike.
In the announcement about the rollout, YouTube says: “Discovering new creators shouldn’t require a translator. We’re excited to introduce a few new updates to our auto dubbing tool, designed to make global stories feel local. Now, exploring content from all over the world is as easy as pressing play”.
The blog post goes on to explain the languages for which dubbing is an option, explaining that effort has been made to match the tone of the original content:
Auto dubbing is now available to everyone, with an expanded library of 27 languages. In December, YouTube averaged more than 6 million daily viewers who watched at least 10 minutes of auto dubbed content. It’s never been easier to discover content from more corners of the world.
But it’s not just about what is said — it’s how it’s said. We’ve launched Expressive Speech for all YouTube channels in 8 languages (English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), to help capture a creator’s original emotion and energy.
YouTube goes on to talk about how it has made the feature optional, calming concerns people may have about having dubbing forced upon them: “We know that one size doesn’t fit all for viewers enjoying auto dubbed content. That’s why we’ve introduced a Preferred Language setting for our multilingual community and anyone who wants to watch a video in its original language. While we already default language selection based on your watch history, you can now indicate your preferences to manage how you want to hear your favorite creators”.
The company shares a video which details how the system works:
Effort has been put into making everything seem as realistic and natural as possible. YouTube says:
To make auto dubs even more natural, we’re currently testing a Lip Sync pilot that subtly matches the speaker’s lip movements to the translated audio so a dubbed video feels as seamless as watching the original.
Full details are available in YouTube’s blog post.
Image credit: bilalulker / depositphotos
