YouTube Now Allows All Creators to Add Their Own Multi-Language Audio Tracks

YouTube has announced that it has rolled out its Multi-Language Audio (MLA) feature to “millions of creators,” enabling them to upload their own audio tracks in multiple languages using human voiceover artists or recordings from other AI tools.

The announcement follows YouTube’s decision in June to roll out automated AI-generated dubs to 80 million creators worldwide, which creators slammed as “too robotic” and “cringe,” triggering some creators to demand access to the MLA tool.

YouTube, which made the MLA tool available to a limited number of YouTube creators in early 2023, stated that “on average, creators uploading Multi-Language Audio tracks to their videos saw over 25% of their watch time come from views in the video’s non-primary language.”

In addition, YouTube commented that MLA tracks “amplified views by 3x” on Jamie Oliver’s channel, with one creator, Mark Rober, having the “highest number of MLA dubs uploaded,” with an average of 30 language tracks per video.

According to YouTube, creators have expressed concern about the discoverability of multilingual dubs if these are uploaded weeks after the original video and audio track. YouTube’s Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie said, “the discovery team very purposefully treats [new multilingual audio tracks] as a new video for that audience, so whether you [upload] it the same day or a week later, there’s no theoretical penalty.”

Creators have also expressed concern about YouTube’s CPM metrics, which vary across countries. Ritchie said, “Let’s say [creators] get USD 100 in one market and USD 20 in the other market and the average says USD 60. They start to panic and say ‘what happened?’ But that’s just the average. The total you’re getting now is USD 120. It’s actually additive.”

Chef Nick DiGiovanni, who has been a part of the MLA pilot program, said, “The first decision you have to make when you decide whether or not to dub your videos is do you want AI or human voiceovers? We chose pretty quickly human voiceover, because I just felt like I would miss out on some of my personality when translating to other languages.”

“I want to sound hip in Japanese […] and I want to be able to sound cool in Thailand or make a funny joke there. […] We knew it was going to be more expensive, but we decided to just make that decision to give that slightly better viewer experience,” he added.

Multilingual Thumbnails

As part of the announcement, YouTube also revealed that it has “even begun piloting multi-language thumbnails with a select group of creators, giving them the opportunity to add localized thumbnails based off of viewers’ selected language.”

DiGiovanni commented that localized thumbnails “feels like [the video] was made for [those audiences] from the start. […] It’s a small shift in a way, but at the same time it’s not, because the sooner you realize how important thumbnails are, the better your channel is going to be. […] It’s like the front cover of a book, you need to get people to open that first page.”

Since the launch of AI dubbing, several LSIs have raised funding to scale multilingual YouTube channels for creators, creating separate channels for each language on behalf of creators. With the rollout of MLA, LSIs and LTPs now enable creators to upload multilingual audio tracks using one core channel.