YouTube can now automatically dub your videos

YouTube is the second most visited site in the world, with over 2.5 billion monthly active users. Only a tiny fraction of these users speak your language, and if you’re a creator on the platform, it makes sense to dub your videos in multiple languages to reach more viewers. YouTube already has a cool feature that lets you generate subtitles in various languages to cater to a broader audience. Now, the platform has introduced a new tool to help you automatically generate alternate audio tracks in different languages.

YouTube says its new dubbing tool can detect the language of uploaded videos and create dubbed versions automatically. The tool currently supports nine languages: English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. It automatically dubs English videos in all the other supported languages. However, if the uploaded video is in any of the other languages, it’s only dubbed into English.

The auto dubbing tool is currently available for channels in the YouTube Partner Program that focus on knowledge and information, but it will soon expand to other content types. If it’s available for your channel, you’ll find it in the Advanced Settings within YouTube Studio.

YouTube recommends reviewing dubs before publishing videos, as the dubs could “contain errors due to mispronunciation, accents, dialects, or background noise in the original video.” The tool may also face issues translating proper nouns, idioms, and jargon and may fail to match the voice used for dubbing with the original voice. To ensure viewers know when a video is dubbed with the new tool, YouTube will add a new “Auto-dubbed” label in the video description.

Despite these shortcomings, YouTube’s new auto dubbing tool is a great addition, especially for small creators who can’t afford to hire a professional to dub their videos. YouTube is already working to make dubs more accurate, expressive, and natural in partnership with Google DeepMind and Google Translate, and it plans to bring an Expressive Speech feature to “help emulate the creator’s tone, emotion, and even the ambiance of the surroundings” soon.

In addition to the new auto dubbing tool, YouTube has updated the bottom bar in the Android and iOS apps with a new translucent design (via 9to5Google). The updated bottom bar is rolling out with version 19.47 on Android and version 19.49 on iOS.