YouTube has taken a major step in integrating automatic dubbing into content creators’ standard workflows. The video platform’s Chief Product Officer, Johanna Voolich, announced on September 18, 2024, that “hundreds of thousands” of creators would — over the coming months — get access to automatic dubbing capabilities.

YouTube’s announcement did not specify the exact tech but it may be Aloud, which was developed at Google’s Area 120 incubator.

YouTube has been “quietly testing” multi-language audio tracks since 2021; Google first introduced Aloud in 2022, granting some YouTubers early access to Aloud’s machine dubbing by March 2022.

An update on Aloud’s website explained that the dubbing provider is now a part of YouTube, and there is no charge for YouTube creators to use its dubbing tools.

“Aloud is currently only available to trusted testers who are helping evaluate the technology. We will be onboarding targeted creators who can help provide feedback, evaluate and improve the product. Interested creators can contact their partner managers at YouTube,” the statement read.

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Since its inception, Aloud has also handled dubbing into Hindi and Indonesian, though neither of these languages is explicitly mentioned by YouTube as current options for creators. (YouTube did, however, make it available to healthcare partners in India in 2022.)

The fundamentals of Aloud’s automatic dubbing technology seems to remain unchanged: Creators (or their producers and other team members) upload the video; including same-language captions is optional, as Aloud can generate a transcription. Users then choose which languages the audio will be automatically dubbed into. For now, English audio can be dubbed into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, “and more,” plus content from those languages into English.

In February 2023, YouTube made ultra-popular personality Mr. Beast’s videos available in 14 languages, dubbed by professional artists. By the time VidCon rolled around in June 2023, the company shared that hundreds of creators were trying it out, dubbing English audio into Spanish and Portuguese.

‘Cool,’ ‘Huge,’ ‘Fire’

Based on comments on a YouTube video recap of the announcement users and creators are excited about the launch.

“Thanks for the dubbing! I was waiting for this feature so long time,” one commenter remarked. Others said it “sounds cool,” “would be huge for my channel,” and even “[a]uto dubbing is fire.”

Naturally, YouTube has presented automatic dubbing as an easy way for content creators to gain scores of new followers — or, as YouTube phrased it, “long-lasting opportunities to forge your own path to success.” Advertisers’ interest in monetizing content typically depends on a channel’s number of followers, so creators have a compelling incentive to hop on the bandwagon. 

For all the enthusiasm from creators, YouTube’s automatic dubbing feature directly competes with startups that offer AI-enabled dubbing as an add-on or integral service. AI Multilingual Video and Audio was the most populated category in the Slator Language AI 50 under 50 in 2024.

Top YouTube creators are a pillar of Unilingo’s clientele in particular. When Slator asked CEO Farbod Mansorian about AI dubbing in June 2023, his take was that AI-dubbed content was associated with lower average viewing retention rates, compared to human-dubbed content. Mansorian attributed this to AI’s weaknesses in effectively capturing emotions and intonations. 

YouTube is already on it, apparently. According to the latest announcement, YouTube is “now piloting a new capability with a handful of creators, that will transfer your tone and intonation, the ambiance of your surroundings — and infuse it into the dubbed audio, making the experience sound even more natural.”

While the potential impact of the launch could be huge, YouTube so far has publicized few details as to how the latest class of YouTube creators will be selected to experiment with automatic dubbing, nor has the company disclosed a timeline for additional language capabilities beyond “the coming months.”