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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Interesting Auto-Dub feature.

Yes, that's cool, however, I would like not to be forced auto-translations from languages I understand.

I am French and this is my primary language, but I understand English and Google knows that (it is in my account preferences). So why do I get videos auto-translated from English into French, with a significant loss in quality. It is particularly bad for titles, the translations are terrible and I can't get YouTube to show me the untranslated title. I probably could set YouTube to use English instead of French, but then, I would have French videos translated into English, which is even worse.

It's absolutely infuriating. It could be such an awesome accessibility feature if it wasn't force-enabled by default. But what we get instead is YouTube engineers assuming that everyone just speaks a single language and needs auto-translations on every video. For every channel where this feature is enabled, I have to keep switching back to the original English audio track on every single video because YouTube knows that just because my primary browser language is set to German (the secondary language being English, btw), I am incapable of understanding the original audio track, of course.

I believe you can disable it clicking on the gear.

On every. single. video. again. and. again. They don't remember your choice.

And it keeps the auto-translated video title, so if that one is garbage there is extra work involved in figuring out what the original title meant to say, too.

Yep, it's a terrible materialization of a theoretically awesome idea. Both because of these details and because of the robotic tone of the voice compared to the demos they had released.

Click the gear icon.

There are so many realistic text to voice project shared on HN. Why YouTube is using robotic voice, and it sounds irritating and I can't listen to it more than a minute.

I don't know, I would prefer such things to be slightly robotic over them being in the uncanny valley.

It's been years since Google demoed their shocking AI voice calls, and still this seems to be the state of things. It's hard to separate the words from the robotic voice here but the state of Google Translate has also been really sad the last few times I've tried it, given the fantastic translation that most LLMs can provide these days.

It's almost certainly because of the scale at which this type of thing needs to run. There are a lot of YouTube videos.

The only thing that makes sense is that good models require a lot of compute, probably more than the transcoding that happens when you upload.

This guy's German is very clear, and it's a joy to listen to the presentation. What is the accent? I can see he's based near Münster. I can recommend listening in original language if you know it even a little bit.

It's a bavarian/Munich accent.

Yes, but I would prefer the original audio with translated captions. Why isn't that possible? If they can auto-dub, it should be even easier to give us translated captions.

Same, disabling it and looking for subtitles was the first thing I tried to do.

It is, click the gear icon.

No, only German subtitles. No auto-translated to English (or some other language I would understand).

Maybe auto-translation isn't available in your country. It's there when I watched the video.

Seriously. We get so jaded by problems and over-hype of what we collectively call 'AI' but this is something that would have seemed like impossible futuretech 10 years ago.

Indeed. YouTube is rolling this out to more and more folks, and it gets really interesting as you can kinda produce videos in your language but still have an international audience. The quality is not outstanding as the voice is a bit robotic, but still... In my channel even if I don't yet have the feature enabled, just because of subtitles auto-translation, I'm seeing more and more foreign subscribers.

It's interesting but I wish I could turn it off. would be nice to have a button "dub this for me" instead of being forced to have all the content translated into 1 language, which is infuriating if you understand multiple.

Edit: aha you can switch back to the original audio track

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