I was told by YouTube last night that our channel has been selected for inclusion in their new auto-dubbing service. As they put it:

We will soon enable automatic dubbing for new video uploads on your channel. This means that YouTube will automatically generate translated audio tracks in different languages, making your content accessible to more viewers. Videos in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese will be dubbed into English, and videos in English will be dubbed into those languages.

A necessary word of warning is that the autodubbing by YouTube is not perfect. My son Thomas, who I work with on the videos, has a lot of experience of dubbing on other projects he has worked on and there are definitely better options than that YouTube is offering, but they are also very time consuming to create. So, we will live with the flaws.

The other issue is that we will still put on English subtitles, and those using dubbing will have to live with that.

This said, those channels that have had access to this feature so far (and that means big channels in education and related issues, in the main) are suggesting traffic increases by maybe forty per cent as a result. We cannot ignore that: our aim is to get a message out there, so we think this is good news.