I dubbed one of my videos using YouTube’s Multi-language Audio and even though the result was only good enough, I believe it ended up much better than the AI alternative.

The video below has two audio tracks recorded by me: the original in Portuguese and an additional one in English. If your YouTube account isn’t set to Portuguese, you should be hearing it in English.

This Multi-language Audio feature is a much better option in comparison to the AI-created auto-dubbing, but it is a lot of work. I spent the morning doing some tests, and I noticed that to achieve a good enough video, a lot of preparation has to be done.

To upload your own dubbing track, go to the Video Details page on YouTube Studio, select Languages, then click the Add language button, choose the language, and, finally, click on Add next to Dub to upload your file.

At least for now, it doesn’t look like YouTube is doing anything to make sure one track is perfectly aligned with the other. It even recommends having dubbed audios with the same length as the original. This means I had to script the video, record it in one language, and then, when recording the other, I had to make sure it would end up at around the same duration.

It may not look like it, but that was a ton of work. And this is as basic as a video can get. The amount of work it would take to do this on one of my how-to videos, for example, is too much compared to just recording two separate videos. And that’s what I believe YouTube should be doing.

Creators who speak and record in more than one language should be able to upload entire videos in different languages. Depending on the settings of who’s watching, YouTube would play the better-matching video. That would be a game changer.

For now, I’ll only be dubbing just some of my videos - most likely the ones where I’m sharing the screen most of the time.

Nevertheless, this is one more important step towards making creators' content reachable by people from anywhere in the world.