YouTube says hello, hola, and नमस्ते by expanding auto-dubbing to educational creators

YouTube is expanding access to a product that could revolutionize video translation on the Google-owned hub. “Hundreds of thousands of channels” that are affiliated with the YouTube Partner Program can now take advantage of a tool that automatically generates foreign-language dub tracks for selected videos.

The state-of-the-art dubbing tool has been in the works for years. It first showed up on channels last year, when a few thousand creators (including MrBeast) got their hands on it. During that testing phase, dub tracks in more than 40 languages were added to 3,500 videos.

The latest expansion of YouTube’s auto-dubber targets a category that has received significant investments from the platform: Education. According to a YouTube blog post, channels “that are focused on knowledge and information” can now streamline the creation of foreign-language dubs. Those types of videos are currently huge on TikTok, so it’s not a shock to see YouTube angling for a bigger chunk of that growing viewership.

Channels in other categories will get access to the feature “soon.” To see if your channel qualifies for the current phase of the auto-dubber rollout, check out the advanced settings

in YouTube Studio. Creators who locate the tool will be able to convert English-language audio tracks into tongues like French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The proliferation of language dubbing tools on YouTube has allowed channels from all over the world to pull in millions of subscribers by reaching new viewers across the globe. YouTube previously recognized the growing influence of non-English content when it updated its channel handles to make them compatible with non-Latin alphabets.

Even though there’s plenty of viewership data to suggest that language dubbing can be a powerful boost to any channel’s numbers, some creators may choose to stick with individual foreign-language hubs that have been built up year-over-year. But for channels that focus on educational topics, a new solution has now arrived.