How to Use Aloud: YouTube's AI Voice Generator for Seamless Multilingual Video Dubbing

As artificial intelligence technology evolves, its uses for video production and content creation continues to grow. Along with new AI-powered video editing tools and plugins, one of the more popular AI trends of late is advancements in AI-powered voices used for dubbing.

There's a lot worth exploring if you aren’t familiar with the dubbing process and how voices are utilized in video content. As we’ll explore in this article, YouTube is reportedly gearing up to add an AI voice generator for Youtube videos to their social video content platform.

This is big news and could be a game-changer for content creators looking to quickly and easily dub their videos in different languages and further streamline their shooting, editing, and distribution processes.

Let’s look at the news of how YouTube is bringing over the team from Aloud and what it could mean for the future of content creation.

What is Youtube's AI Dubbing Tool?

As originally reported by The Verge, Aloud was first developed as part of Google’s Area 120 incubator. According to Aloud’s website, the AI tool promises to easily transcribe, translate, and produce a dub for your videos.

From the samples on Aloud’s website, it seems pretty simple and easy to use. However, we can assume that there are actually some pretty sophisticated AI models at work here. It’s no small feat for an AI to fully transcribe a video, much less create new audio dubs, and sync said audio into a video at the correct moments.

It sounds quite promising indeed, as the site's information shares that roughly 80% of the world doesn’t speak English. Yet—for English-speaking content creators—your content is only going to be viewable by the 20% speaking your same language. Aloud aims to vastly expand everyone’s potential audience size.

What is AI dubbing?

Let’s take a step back and define what AI dubbing technology is and how it works. For those unfamiliar, dubbing is the art of adding dialog (spoken word) audio to videos. Dubbing originated in the early days of cinema, where it was common practice for talkies (or what we would call movies) to have actors record their lines separately from their filmed scenes.

These days, dubbing for videos is often done to correct mistakes like misspoken words or poorly recorded audio. Films, television, and other forms of video are also dubbed to be presented in different languages so that content can be shown in different countries.

With the new AI dubbing technology, though, the practice of having actors dub dialog over videos is replaced with YouTube’s AI voice generator, which aims to mimic how people talk and perform dialog.

So far, AI dubbing technology has mostly come in either text-to-speech, where an AI receives a text prompt and designs a voice to read the text based on prompt demands, or AI voice cloning, where an AI listens to a voice and replicates its unique characteristics into different texts or languages.

YouTube’s AI dubbing future

The same article confirms that YouTube is already testing the tool with creators on the platform and can support at least a few languages, with more coming soon.

If you want to see (or, more accurately, hear) this AI voice for YouTube videos in action, you can check out the results yourself. In this YouTube video, we see how the Aloud AI tool offers a Spanish dub track for this YouTube channel. (To use this tool, simply click on the settings gear icon and select the Spanish audio track.)

Of course, this tool isn’t perfect just yet, but its current capabilities are a promising start. As Aloud continues to advance and become more available, it will allow creators to scale their content in ways previously unavailable.

How should content creators prepare?

Now that we’ve reviewed the news about YouTube’s AI dubbing plans, we can finally ask ourselves how content creators should prepare to use this new technology. First and foremost, the name of the game for most content creators is, of course, to expand their audience and grow their brand.

Even if you’re creating content for a small niche, chances are you’re still limited by language. Translation services have existed for years, of course, but they are expensive and time consuming. Having the ability to quickly and easily create content that is viewable in multiple languages will be a game changer for video creators, allowing videos to reach a whole new audience.

Here are some ways we’d recommend preparing for this new technology:

Review your audience and primary language
Consider expanding to different audiences and different languages
Try out the Aloud AI voice generator for your YouTube videos
Review where YouTube fits into your video distribution plans
Look into what other areas you can expand your brand and content with different dubs

It would also be safe to assume that this Aloud tool will be a work in progress for some time. So, even when it is officially released to YouTube content creators, learning and adding to your workflow might take a bit. However, if you’re patient and willing to learn, you will be able to harness the power of this new technology.

The future of AI-assisted content creation

The Verge reports that YouTube is working to eventually make any translated audio tracks sound like the creator’s voice with expression and even lip sync in the future, which is just one more reason to be excited about this technology.

There’s no firm timeline for Aloud's release, though. Yet, if you’re truly interested in staying tuned into the future of AI-assisted content creation, this is by far one of the most exciting AI-powered tools on the way.

If you’d like to learn more about other AI-powered or AI-assisted tools for video editing and content creation, check out the helpful articles linked below.