YouTube AI Dubbing is Live Now

YouTube has announced that it has officially rolled out automated multilingual dubbing for “hundreds of thousands of channels” in a highly anticipated update that was first released under early access in 2022, and flagged for general release in September this year.

The auto dubbing feature, formally known as Aloud, enables creators to automatically dub English audio to French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Videos originally recorded in any of these languages will be automatically dubbed into English.

The feature is only available to creators in YouTube’s Partner Program that are “focused on knowledge and information,” and is enabled for newly uploaded videos and shorts.

Eligible creators can manually review dubbed videos before publishing them, either reviewing “all languages”, or “experimental languages only”, which it defines as “languages that are likely to contain translation errors.” Creators have the option to un-publish or delete dubbed audio across individual languages. Crucially, creators cannot upload their own dubbed tracks, which will come as a disappointment to the many AI dubbing startups and to anyone involved in human-in-the-loop dubbing.

According to Creator Insider, an informal YouTube channel from the YouTube Creator technical team, “viewers will be defaulted into an audio track based on their language preference and watch history.” Viewers can also toggle between different languages on the video’s settings button, and will see an “auto-dubbed” label in the video description.

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The feature has already been used by several eligible creators, who have dubbed videos into English and into other languages. One user commented, “I was just checking the German dub and it sounded very robotic and unnatural, the AI also chose a women’s voice for all the men.”

Another commented, “The dubbed voices change a lot in my videos with 2 people. We were two males and the dubbed voices switched from female to male young and old. That was strange.”

YouTube was quick to manage expectations: “It’s important to remember that this technology is still pretty new, and it won’t always be perfect. We’re 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.”

YouTube confirmed that future updates to the feature will include “even more accurate, expressive, and natural” voices, and that channel creators who publish “other types of content” will be able to access the feature at a future date.