It was almost like a bizarre fever dream where I could suddenly understand Korean, yet the voices of the people who I thought I knew what they sounded like, actually sounded quite different.
Then, almost as fast as it started, everything was back to normal and evidence of what I thought I’d experienced had absolutely disappeared.
Had someone stuffed a Babel fish in my ear, then quietly removed it while I slept?
No, it was YouTube’s uncanny Auto-dubbing feature. I tried it, it was very odd, and now it has completely gone away.
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What on Earth happened?
I’m still not sure
You’ll have to indulge me while I explain how all this came about. I decided to watch a behind-the-scenes video by the K-pop group Ive about the recording of its recent song Blackhole.
These are not unusual videos in the K-pop world, and give fans not only a chance to hear their favorite members sing live and unedited, but they are also a fun look at the overall process and work that goes into recording a song.
Everyone in the video speaks Korean, but the studios understand groups have a loyal international following, and most of the time provide comprehensive subtitle tracks. This was what I expected to see when I pressed play on the video.
Instead, while the subtitles appeared, everyone was also speaking in English. This was jarring on its own, but it was made even more uncanny because it was clear the members weren’t actually the ones speaking English at all.
It’s not another human person doing the dubbing either. It’s AI, and despite the impressive things Google has achieved, you’re very aware it’s not a real person speaking.
Voices from beyond
Not the sound I expected
It took a moment for me to understand what was going on.
At first, I wasn’t sure if it was the work of the studio, which led me to the Settings menu to check the language options, where I discovered the Auto-dubbing mode. It was active by default, and not something I had selected, hence my surprise.
After the source of the English language was discovered, I became intrigued.
The voices I was hearing weren’t the voices of the Ive members, and the auto-dubbing still subtly changed the tone and intonation for each member when they spoke, to the point where it was hushed when the member was obviously speaking quietly.
It had the effect of giving the members’ artificial voices character, individuality, and personality, but it wasn’t their own personality. It was one generated by Google Gemini, the force behind YouTube’s dubbing technology.
It was undeniably clever, but still very unsettling, and actually quite concerning.
People’s vocal tones are still unique and recognizable even if they don’t speak the same language as you do.
For an auto-dubbing feature to conjure up its own vocal tone and apply it to a person is at best artistic license, and at worse a creepy, almost dystopian liberty.
Worst of all, the Auto-dubbing worked when the members were singing. Gemini may be many things, but a wonderful vocalist it is not.
I wonder how people who make their living off their voice feel about Google letting Gemini give them a voice that’s not their own?
A bit too messy
A lot going on
It wasn’t just the group’s voices that were changed. Similarly odd and distracting was how it dubbed the voice of the off-screen producer, giving the person a more aggressive tone.
This unseen individual’s auto-dubbed voice often interrupted the dubbed singing due to the way the standard audio had to be muted for “it” to speak.
The muting and resulting delay in the auto-dubbed voice speaking was a problem. The original audio has to be muted, otherwise it would all become a garbled mess of words.
The trouble is, it was hard to focus on one voice, especially because it never sounded quite human, and wasn’t what I expected the members to sound like when they talked.
What was presumably intended to open up non-English videos to a wider audience instead served as a huge distraction, taking what was usually just one person talking to a camera and making it chaotic, and anyone who wanted to understand and enjoy the video would be far better off reading the subtitles.
It entirely removed me from the video, as all I did was focus in on the uncanny valley of artificial voices that now dominated it.
And just like that
It was gone
You may have noticed I’ve talked about YouTube’s Auto-dubbing feature in the past tense, and that’s because, since that day, I have never seen it again.
I regularly watch videos in Korean and Japanese, but Auto-dubbing not only hasn’t activated, it hasn’t even been an option. I’ve mostly watched on the YouTube TV app through Apple TV.
Upon doing some research, the feature only received a global release in February 2026, and may also be something channels must enable themselves.
Its sudden disappearance from Ive’s channel suggests it may not have been well received, and also that Google understands the feature still needs some work.
My one and only experience with YouTube’s Auto-dubbing was surreal enough to be memorable, and I would like to see how the feature changes with different types of video.
Perhaps it’s better when no one is singing? How does it handle male voices? What about videos where there’s lots of background noise?
Because the feature has completely disappeared, I can’t answer these questions. It almost makes me wonder if I imagined it.
