Some web films, no matter how instructional, may be rendered useless if you can’t comprehend them, depending on your language skills. That could change dramatically thanks to a fascinating new feature developed by Google’s experimental division, Area 120. It’s developing a technology that, according to the business, will make adding audio in a language other than the original as easy as entering the translation into a document.
Google announced a new tool called Aloud on Wednesday, and it appears to be very useful for both viewers and creators. As the company points out in its introduction to the tool, dubbing audio in a new language used to be a time-consuming and expensive process. Area 120 combined powerful speech translation and voice synthesis with audio separation technology to create Aloud, reducing a complex and time-consuming process that required many people to a simple one that it claims will not cost creators anything.
In a video demonstration, Google explains how Aloud works in greater detail, and it appears to be surprisingly straightforward. You can construct a synthesized voiceover by using text from subtitles that are currently accessible in many videos or text transcripts generated by Google. Currently, only Spanish and Portuguese are available, but Area 120 wants to add more in the future, including Hindi and Indonesian.
Google wants to translate more than one audio track in the future, in addition to expanding languages. To ensure that viewers are aware that they are hearing a synthesized audio track, artists will be required to declare that dubs were created with Aloud in either the video’s description or a pinned comment. Anyone interested in early access should visit the service’s website to make a request.
