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Khaleej Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Amazon Prime Video tests AI-assisted dubbing on 12 movies and series
Amazon's Prime Video streaming service announced on Wednesday it will begin testing Artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted dubbing to make its international content more accessible to viewers worldwide. The pilot programme will initially feature 12 licensed movies and series that previously lacked dubbing support, including titles such as El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora, and Long Lost. The service will launch with English and Latin American Spanish dubbing options. "At Prime Video, we believe in improving customers' experience with practical and useful AI innovation," said Raf Soltanovich, VP of technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. "AI-aided dubbing is only available on titles that do not have dubbing support, and we are eager to explore a new way to make series and movies more accessible and enjoyable." The developments came as union leaders in the creative industries bill AI as an existential crisis for artists, who worry that their livelihoods will be wiped out by the technology. The role of AI was a major factor in the 2023 Hollywood strikes by actors and writers who feared that studios would use generative AI to perform tasks typically done by paid creatives. With more than 200 million customers worldwide, Prime Video reports growing interest from viewers seeking to enjoy content regardless of its country of origin. Unlike some competitors, Prime Video said its approach combines artificial intelligence with human expertise, as localisation professionals collaborate with AI technology to ensure quality control. In December, YouTube expanded its AI-powered auto-dubbing capability to "hundreds of thousands of channels" in its Partner Program that focus on knowledge and informational content. YouTube's system automatically generates dubs in eight languages for English content, including French, German, Hindi, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Portuguese. Non-English videos in these languages currently receive only English dubs. YouTube at the time acknowledged that "this technology is still pretty new, and it won't always be perfect." In another recent announcement, Lumiere Ventures and AI startup ElevenLabs unveiled a collaboration to recreate the voice of Alain Dorval, the late French voice actor who dubbed Sylvester Stallone for nearly five decades, for an upcoming film. This project, developed with the support of Dorval's family, aims to preserve the familiar voice French audiences associate with Stallone's characters following Dorval's passing in February.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prime Video is beginning an AI dubbing pilot program for select movies and series
In an effort to make movies and TV shows more accessible on Prime Video, Amazon announced that it's testing an AI dubbing system that will translate select content on the company's streaming service into other languages. Amazon says that "AI-aided dubbing" will be available in English and Latin American Spanish on 12 licensed movies and series available through Prime Video, including "El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora and Long Lost." That the company describes it as "AI-aided dubbing" rather than just AI dubbing appears to be key here. Amazon says it's taking a hybrid approach where "localization professionals collaborate with AI." A safe guess would be that Amazon's AI system takes a first pass at generating dubs and then professionals edit them for accuracy and fit. Creating captions, subtitles and dubs is a fairly big business, especially now that streaming has increased the number of films and series that are made every year and licensed to be viewed around the world. It makes sense that streamlining the process of making content more accessible would be of interest to Amazon. The possible problem is, at least for film and television, dubbing is done by professional actors. AI-generated voices have gotten more lifelike over the years, but it remains to be seen whether the average person will be okay with a large portion of their media diet being delivered by something human-adjacent rather than the real deal. Of course, maybe we'll be trained to accept it because it will be all over social media first. Amazon isn't alone in leveraging AI to squeeze more out of the videos on its platform. YouTube released a tool in 2024 that lets creators automatically dub their videos in other languages when they upload them, and more recently, Meta announced plans to automatically dub and lip-sync Reels on Instagram into other languages.