YouTube itself is a major platform for broadcasting audiovisual content on the Internet. He lives up to this position partly because he is a dean, but also because he has not stopped reinventing himself. for 18 years since its establishmentback in 2005. And of course, the acquisition of the service by Google, only a year and a half after its launch, contributed significantly to this.

Although the service was born, like many of those we use daily, in the United States, its internationalization began to take place practically from its birth, and although a large part of the most influential content creators worldwide publish their content in English, an audience that, at least natively, communicates in other languages, it is literally huge. More precisely, as we can read in this report, about two-thirds of the 250 most watched channels publish content in English, followed by 15% in Spanish and 7% in Portuguese.

Google is aware of this and is adding some features to YouTube, such as subtitles, to extend the reach of videos regardless of the language in which they were originally uploaded. However, the work with creating and editing subtitles is somewhat tedious (except for the automatically generated ones, which are not as accurate as those created by a professional translator. Moreover, reading them distracts from the video, so we can end up missing important elements.

However, that is about to change. As we can read in Engadget, YouTube is testing an AI-based automatic video dubbing tool. Specifically, this new feature, which comes from Google’s Area 120 incubator project, will first rewrite the text of the video and allow the creator to review and edit the original text. And once it’s verified, it proceeds to translate it and then generate a dubbing for it.

According to the aforementioned YouTube publication already testing this tool with hundreds of English-speaking creators that in this first phase of testing can create dubbing in Spanish and Portuguese (It is no coincidence that, as mentioned above, they are the second and third most common languages ​​on the platform). The dubbing is created in a few minutes, and using this feature is completely free. You can check the result of this tool in this video:

It’s true that dubbing doesn’t sound as natural as a human voice, but YouTube plans to introduce some interesting improvements in the future, including that the voice used in the dubbing is similar to the creator’s voice in the original soundtrack. And if you’re wondering if these plans are long-term, the truth is they’re not, as they point to 2024.