Google’s incubator, Area 120, has been working on a new tool called Aloud. With Aloud, content creators will be able to dub their videos in multiple languages, allowing them to reach a greater audience. While these creators can already use subtitles on YouTube, Aloud will be able to connect creators with those who don’t like subtitles or perhaps aren’t literate and can’t read them
From today, creators are allowed to request early access to Aloud but it supports just a handful of languages right now: Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Bahasa-Indonesian. Google said that it’ll extend the offering of languages soon and hopefully this will be the case when it leaves early access.
Explaining the problem with the current state of affairs, Google said:
“Subtitles can help bridge the language gap, but they’re not always ideal on mobile devices due to the small form factor, the necessity of constant attention to the screen, and accessibility challenges for those with visual or reading impairments. Dubbing, the process of adding a translated voice track, overcomes those limitations, but is time-consuming and cost-prohibitive for most creators.”
To avoid the effort and cost of dubbing content, Aloud uses audio separation, machine translation, and speech synthesis to do the heavy lifting of dubbing content for creators. All creators need to do is provide a video and subtitles in the original language – if subtitles aren’t available then you can review the automatically generated text transcript to ensure everything is right.
To help with transparency, creators who use Aloud to make dubs must clearly state in the video description, as a pinned comment, or in the post-credits screen that they are using synthetic dubs with a reference to the original content. Initially, Google wants to bring Aloud dubs to educational content before rolling it out to other content types.