The voice sounds like it's from a tin can: anyone accessing more and more YouTube videos from a German IP address will automatically hear a computer-generated dubbing instead of the original soundtrack. The feature was introduced several years ago, but was not the default setting for a long time. However, it has been active on hundreds of thousands of channels since December. It is not only since then that there have been complaints about it, as many users speak the language (especially English) in which a video was originally dubbed. And even if they don't, they should be given the opportunity to decide for themselves. But this is exactly what is not possible by default: from the user's point of view, there is no central switch that permanently deactivates auto-dubbing. Neither the language or location setting of the YouTube interface is used as a feature, nor the language of the operating system. Google appears to be guided entirely by the IP-based location data that the company receives from the user's provider.

Settings are not retained

Even those who have taken out a premium subscription to YouTube for just under 13 euros, which hides advertising, cannot switch off auto-dubbing. There is currently no setting for this in the interface. The only way to get rid of automatic synchronization is to pay attention to the small notice and icon below the video title every time you watch a new video: If it says Auto-Dubbing, you have to pause the video and quickly switch the audio track to Original. Otherwise, the dubbing will simply start. Some users report that switching to the original audio track once is enough for the selection to remain sticky, i.e. the auto-dubbing does not start again the next time the video is played. However, this was not the case in our tests.

The voice generators used by YouTube sound extremely robotic and are sometimes accelerated to 1.5 times the original speed, which makes them even more unpleasant. The AI can at least distinguish between a man and a woman, but both voices are of similarly inferior quality. It is surprising that YouTube and its parent company Google use such poor artificial voices and translation systems –. The internet company is already much further ahead in its research, offering extremely lifelike podcast presenters from canned AI in its NotebookLM product, for example. There have also long been significantly better AI voice generators for YouTube creators, which are even based on the original voices – HeyGen or DupDub, for example, make it extremely easy to generate a corresponding audio track. ElevenLabs, a veteran in the AI voice generator market, also offers significantly higher quality and manages this with just a few seconds of audio, while YouTube has entire videos available to generate voices.

Translation sometimes only semi

In addition, the auto-dubbing also occasionally misses the mark with the integrated translation. The sentences often seem stiff and there are also mistranslations. However, the viewer does not notice any of these, as the automatic transcription for the subtitles uses what is spit out by the auto-dubbing. YouTube creators should therefore listen to the translations at least once before leaving them online. In the meantime, YouTube had launched an automatic survey among users to find out how they liked the function –. It is unclear what the result was. Users have been complaining on Reddit and in the Google forums for months, but there has been no response from Google to at least turn off the function.

Incidentally, the only people who can protect users from poor synchronization are the YouTube creators themselves: They have the option of switching off auto-dubbing or not allowing it to run automatically over their videos. However, a surprising number of people do not do this – either because they are unaware of the quality or because they hope that they will find more users who do not understand the language they are using and will stick with it anyway.

The creatives are in demand

YouTube describes in a help document in its support area how creators can switch off the function. "Automatic synchronization helps make information more accessible worldwide, even if not all videos can be successfully or accurately synchronized. Because dubs are created automatically, they may contain errors due to pronunciation errors, accents, dialects or background noise in the original video," YouTube itself writes succinctly, before advising that "you or someone who understands the target language" is best to listen through the auto-dubbing in advance to make sure it doesn't contain any errors. In addition to German and English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are currently supported as auto-dubbing languages (in both directions) –. Japanese, Hindi and Indonesian are also currently marked as experimental. It can be assumed that the quality of the translations in these three languages is even worse than the German version.

For YouTube, auto-dubbing is also the default setting on the creative side: "This feature is enabled by default. When you upload a new video, synchronizations are automatically created. These dubs are automatically published for non-experimental languages." Creators who want to disable the feature can do so channel-wide in YouTube Studio – via the default upload settings and the advanced settings. It is also possible to check auto-dubbing before each publication – or to be reminded to do so before a video is released. Synchronizations can also be deleted retrospectively via YouTube Studio. In addition to auto-dubbing, YouTube is also increasingly relying on automatically activated translated subtitles. Here too, there is no switch that sets the default setting from the viewer's perspective: You always have to click them off again or switch them over.

(olb)