YOUTUBE AUDIO OPTIONS
YouTube has a new button for automatic translations – YEAH! – we all love new buttons!
When you think and talk about the future as much as I do, you’re bound to be right sometimes. In October 2023 I shot a piece about the end of the dubbing industry. No – the dubbing industry still exists – I mean this claim:
“My prediction: in the future there will be a button to switch the language on YouTube or Netflix.”
Here is the whole piece about the dubbing industry:
Netflix hasn’t introduced the button yet. For their standards the quality is currently still too modest. But on YouTube more and more channels can enable the “automatically translate” checkbox. What comes out so far and how it compares to a translation with HeyGen – that’s what we look at today.
If you scroll through YouTube these days, you see this label more and more often:
“Auto-dubbed”. That means YouTube has automatically translated this video into various languages. Here, for example, a video about the new DJI Flip:
The automatic translation still sounds a bit robotic, but the translation is correct. I can understand the video even though I don’t speak the original language.
I’m not 100% happy with my HeyGen translation either, even though it sounds much more natural.
But is this really the end of the dubbing industry? If development keeps going this fast, low-budget productions will tend toward this option more and more often.
This topic didn’t leave me alone for quite a while. That’s why I talked to a professional from the industry. Hansi Jochmann. You can watch the whole interview – almost a full hour – here. Here is the whole video:
The AI version can’t yet stand up to the comparison with Hansi – but lip sync and costs weigh against that. I can also imagine the voice being re-recorded and the picture being synced to the new voice. That would mean an entirely new way of working in the dubbing studio. Dialogue writers would no longer have to squeeze German translations onto American lips at all costs. The lips move to the new text.
Try out a video like that with “Auto-dubbed”. What do you think of the quality?
Are there channels you’ve long wanted to watch but you don’t speak French, Farsi or Greek? Write it in the comments.
When the button shows up on Netflix, I’ll certainly make a video about it.
So you don’t miss it: subscribe to the channel and hit the bell.