YouTube has announced a major update to its auto-dub system, introducing expanded language support, more natural-sounding translated audio, new viewer controls and improved creator tools. The update aims to make multilingual videos more accessible while maintaining the creator’s original tone and intent.
According to Chandralekha Motati, Product Manager at YouTube, the platform is seeing strong adoption of automatically dubbed content. In December alone, over 6 million viewers watched an average of at least 10 minutes of automatically dubbed video every day, highlighting the growing demand for cross-language content.
What’s new in YouTube Auto Dub
27 languages are now supported
Autodub has now expanded to 27 languages, making it more widely available on YouTube. This allows creators to reach global audiences without manually producing multiple language versions of the same video.
Expressive speech for more natural dubbing
YouTube has introduced expressive speech, a feature designed to preserve the tone, emotion and delivery style of the original speaker during translation. Instead of flat, robotic audio, dubbed voices aim to sound closer to how the creator speaks naturally.
Currently, expressive speech is supported in eight languages:
- English
- french
- German
- Hindi
- Indonesian
- italian
- Portuguese
- spanish
New viewer language controls
YouTube is giving viewers more control over how dubbed content plays:
- A new preferred language setting allows users to manually select their play language.
- Viewers can also revert to the original audio when available.
- This works alongside YouTube’s existing system, which automatically selects a language based on viewing history.
Lip sync pilot for visual alignment
YouTube is testing a Lip Sync pilot, which adjusts the speaker’s lip movements to better match the translated audio. The goal is to improve visual consistency and make dubbed videos feel more natural to watch. This feature is currently in limited testing.
Improved creator controls and smart filtering
Some updates focus on creators and how auto-dubbing is applied to their content:
- Smart automatic filtering: Detects videos that may not be suitable for dubbing, such as content with heavy or quiet music, helping to avoid audio mismatch.
- Disclosure behavior: YouTube says that automatic dubbing does not negatively affect the discovery of the original video and can help reach audiences in new languages.
- Manual control: Creators can upload their own dubbed audio tracks or disable automatic dubbing entirely if preferred.
Availability
- Automatic dubbing: Available to creators with support for 27 languages
- Expressive speech: Supports 8 languages (listed above)
- Check preferred language: Available for multilingual viewers
- Lip Sync: Currently in a limited pilot phase
