Over the years, businesses have witnessed how AI has disrupted the localization industry with generative and conversational AI and neural machine translation systems.

While AI dubbing is a relatively new development, industry innovators have enabled the technology to evolve and reach advanced efficiency and practicality within a short timeframe.

 

What Is AI Dubbing?

AI dubbing is a multimedia localization approach that generates automated audio translations using AI technology. Automated audio dubbing for videos allows rapid creation and distribution of multilingual content, with some solutions capable of real-time translations for streamed videos.

Various AI dubbing technologies lead to different results.

For example, certain AI dubbing applications incorporate deepfake technology to alter an actor or actress’s mouth movements to look as if they’re speaking another language. Some of these apps also generate translations using the actor’s original voice.

Others use AI to translate prerecorded videos, achieving precisely what studio translators do, but for a fraction of production costs and time.

Overall, AI dubbing is a massive leap in both the localization and AI industries. It represents the next stage of multimedia localization, allowing companies to tap into new markets and grow their revenue opportunities.

 

How Traditional Dubbing Works

Traditional dubbing is done in a sound booth with a voice actor or “dub artist” who speaks the language you need. However, before recording, the studio creates a transcription, a written copy of the video’s dialogue with matching time stamps.

After recording, the studio replaces the content’s original audio with the new track.

The process works, but it’s an expensive and time-consuming practice. And as the localization market gets increasingly more competitive, finding the right voice actors and finishing production on time is harder.

Unfortunately, traditional dubbing isn’t always appealing to consumers.

If the studio sticks to accurate dialogue translations, the dubbed audio, and the actors’ lip movements could look entirely out of sync. As such, some studios make minor changes to the script for better audio synchronization between the translated dialogue and what viewers see on screen.

AI dubbing technologies aim to fix the problems of traditional dubbing.

 

How AI Dubbing Came to Be

Early AI dubbing technologies used a “speech-to-speech” model, which includes voice recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech.

Using AI-assisted voice recognition, a video transcription automatically generates, which passes through a machine translation layer. The translated transcript then converts back to audio using text-to-speech technology.

Amazon refined this model in 2020, which, in addition to speech-to-speech dubbing, also proposed using artificial background noise and reverberation. Amazon’s model also adjusts audio playback duration to match the actors’ mouth movements. All these advancements made the dubbed audio sound more natural and less robotic.

In 2021, director Scott Mann co-founded the AI dubbing company Flawless, taking the technology further. The company combined deepfake technology with AI-powered dubbing, altering the actors’ mouth movements to match the translated audio.

Today, AI dubbing continues to improve as innovation leaders find ways to integrate technologies like neural networks and cascade speech translation into their systems. Startups, like Deepdub, also use deep learning to “rearrange” an actor’s voice samples from one language to another.

 

What Are the Benefits of AI Dubbing?

AI dubbing offers several benefits when compared to traditional studio dubbing. These include:

Match the Speed of Content Production

While studio dubbing can take weeks or months to process translations, AI dubbing can generate real-time, automated translations. That means you can scale your multimedia localization efforts as quickly as content production.

Translate Regional Dialects

AI dubbing systems are capable of translating and optimizing content to regional dialects. This makes it more practical than traditional dubbing for linguistically diverse countries like India, Nigeria, China, and the United States.

Keep Localized Content On-Brand

With AI dubbing, companies can configure the software to abide by brand safety and tone guidelines. On the other hand, hiring a dubbing service involves working with transcribers, translators, and voice actors who may not be familiar with your company or business.

Translate Across Multiple Languages

Unlike studios, AI dubbing software doesn’t need to look for native speakers or voice actors. AI dubbing platforms can be trained to translate into as many languages as needed.

Save Money

AI dubbing makes multimedia localization accessible and affordable to small and medium enterprises. Some on-demand AI dubbing services cost less than $1 per minute.

Reach a Wider Audience

A single dubbing project can unlock millions of new audiences for your business without requiring new content. For example, dubbing your content in Spanish lets you access a new market with 559 million speakers

 

Subbing vs. Dubbing: What’s The Difference?

Subtitling or “subbing” generates translated text, whereas dubbing generates translated audio. Both methods are used for multimedia localization and can be streamlined with AI.

Subbing is another multimedia localization method that renders translated text over the playback. Subtitles are traditionally shown at the bottom of the screen but can also appear at the top to prevent text from obstructing details in the scene.

The Three Basic Types of Subtitles

• Open captions: The subtitles are baked into the content and can’t be turned off or hidden.
• Closed captions: Closed captions can be turned off and have multilingual options.
• SDH subtitles: Subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) include text that helps describe the scene to people with hearing loss.

Another type of subbing is live captioning, which uses AI speech recognition to generate real-time subtitles. Live captions can be used with automatic speech recognition software to generate translated text.

Subbing is cheaper than dubbing for content localization purposes. However, subtitles can distract the audience from what’s happening in the scene. Dubbing solves this problem by translating what the audience hears. This allows them to focus on what’s being presented on screen, be it a data visualization, step-by-step tutorial, or product demo.

Unlocking Global Markets with AI Multimedia Dubbing

AI dubbing technologies can carve the path to a more accessible multimedia localization strategy for businesses. Any business can scale its content localization efforts congruently with its content production by providing instant audio translations.

Contact Welocalize today for a proven and reliable end-to-end multimedia localization service powered by AI technology and human language experts.