By Seamus McAteer – Feb 5, 2024
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The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on dubbing is becoming undeniable. As content publishers strive for global reach, understanding the nuanced capabilities and limitations of AI dubbing is crucial. This guide introduces the potential, challenges, and underscores the importance of a comprehensive solution, emphasizing the need for a partner like that integrates technology seamlessly to ensure well-timed, high-quality output.
AI-powered text-to-speech technology has indeed evolved, reaching a point where it can mimic natural speech patterns with remarkable accuracy. Emerging generative models show promise in matching emotional context, yet the current state-of-the-art technology is still hit-and-miss, struggling to consistently capture the subtleties of human expression.
Neural machine translation, while capable of delivering precise results, often falls short in grasping the contextual nuances of the source material. This poses a challenge, particularly in content types where the cultural and emotional resonance is integral to the viewer's experience.
Leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) technology may represent a step forward in enhancing the naturalness of translated content. However, it's important to acknowledge that even the most advanced AI models won't entirely eliminate the need for human review, especially for nuanced or culturally sensitive content.
Maintaining dialect consistency poses another challenge. Most text-to-speech (TTS) models are trained on large volumes of spoken dialog for a specific language irrespective of dialect or accent. For example Spanish models will include a mix of European and Latin accented Spanish from a variety of countries. Deriving dubbed output involves concatenating chunks of audio and without guardrails a speaker may sound like they’re from Madrid in one segment and Buneos Aires in another.
Dubbing involves carefully aligning timing and integrating non-verbal vocals, such as cackling or audible exclamations, at the appropriate time. It may be difficult to distinguish elements in source audio or video, such as rap or song lyrics, that should be retained through to the final dub as these are often recognized as voice audio and processed by speech recognition.
Speechlab’s holistic approach ensures that AI technology is not merely clipped together to produce dubbed audio. Instead component models for audio source separation; speech recognition; segmentation and speaker labeling; translation; and text-to-speech are optimized to produce the most natural sounding, high quality output. Our editor is built for dubbing. We support the ability to realign timing for translated segments.We make it easy to align non-verbal vocals and to select to retain audio from the source content. Speechlab generates a speaker voice by cloning the original voice or matching with the closest native speaker voice from a large database. Native matching may yield output that may be more appealing in certain contexts or that addresses concerns related to ownership and use of a speaker’s likeness. In addition we are working with partners to build APIs to ingest human reviewed transcription and / or translation from other platforms.
These are just a few examples of why selecting and working with a partner that focuses on the problem of automated dubbing at scale makes sense. Trying to piece together components of a solution or taking a solution designed for one purpose–say dubbing of short form TikiTok videos–and applying it in an enterprise setting is not a recipe for success.
