Easy as uno, dos, tres, catorce
Depending on your language skills, some online videos — no matter how educational — might be rendered useless to you if you can’t understand them. With an intriguing new feature developed by Area 120, Google’s experimental lab, that could change in a big way. It’s working on a tool that the company says will make adding audio in a different language from the original as simple as typing the translation in a document.
On Wednesday, Google introduced a new feature called Aloud, and it looks to be extremely useful to viewers and creators alike. As the company notes in its introduction to the tool, dubbing audio in a different language was once a job demanding a lot of money and time. In designing Aloud, Area 120 put together advanced speech translation and voice synthesis with audio separation tech, trimming a complex and lengthy process requiring several people down to a simple one that it says won’t cost creators anything.
Google further explains how Aloud works in a video demo, and it sounds surprisingly simple. By inputting text from subtitles already available in many videos or drawing from text transcripts created by Google, you’ll have a synthesized voiceover ready to go. Currently, the supported languages are limited to Spanish and Portuguese, but Area 120 plans to add more in the future, including Hindi and Indonesian.
In addition to expanded languages, Google wants to translate more than one audio track in the future. The company also says that creators will be required to state that dubs were made with Aloud in either the video’s description or in a pinned comment, to ensure that viewers know they are hearing a synthesized audio track. Anyone interested in early access can request it by heading to the service’s website.
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