Google’s in-house incubator Area 120 has introduced a new product called Aloud that allows creators to easily dub their videos into multiple languages. It is cost-effective as well, getting us one step closer towards overcoming the language barrier in videos.
Aloud assists YouTube creators by transcribing, translating, and narrating their videos. It currently supports dubbing into Spanish and Portuguese, with Hindi, Bahasa-Indonesian and other languages coming soon.
Dubbing used to take weeks worth of effort and a large budget. But with Aloud, you only need a few minutes. Google uses advances in audio separation, machine translation and speech synthesis to reduce time-consuming and costly steps like translation, video editing and audio production.
To dub a video with Aloud, all you need to do is provide the video and subtitles in the original language. If subtitles are not available, you can also review the text transcript that is auto-generated by the new tool.
“Dubbing used to take weeks worth of effort and a large budget. But with Aloud, you only need a few minutes. We use advances in audio separation, machine translation and speech synthesis to reduce time-consuming and costly steps like translation, video editing and audio production. You do not even need to know any language other than the ones you already speak, and all of this is available at no cost to the creator,” the Area 120 team wrote in a post.
To ensure transparency, Google requires that creators mention that all dubs produced by Aloud state clearly that they are synthetic dubs with a reference to the original in the video description, as a pinned comment or in the post credits screen.
Google’s Area 120 team is also working with YouTube to let creators add multiple audio tracks to their videos, a new feature that they started testing with a small group of creators late last year.
