BY THE YOUTUBE TEAM
80% of the world doesn’t speak English. What that means for YouTube is a lot of great content isn’t fully accessible to the rest of the world.
That’s why we’re introducing an AI-powered dubbing tool to lessen the language barrier on our platform — so that everything from educational explainers to the latest viral trend can reach a global audience. The tool, called Aloud, was developed as part of Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, and led by two longtime friends, Buddhika Kottahachchi and Sasakthi Abeysinghe. Behind every great product is a great story, so we sat down with them both to learn more about Aloud and their journey from high school rivals to close collaborators and friends.
Not only are you both originally from Sri Lanka, but you actually knew each other growing up! Tell us that story.
Sasakthi: We were both into competitive programming as kids and represented rival high schools! Buddhika and I met as we were training together to represent Sri Lanka for the SEARCC and IOI competitions. We were slight anomalies in that space — we were both more of hackers of code, than implementers of textbook algorithms — so we bonded and kept in touch over the years. Funny enough, our careers brought us both to Google (and now YouTube) so we started hanging out again and collaborating on different ideas.
Where did the idea for Aloud come from? What led you to start creating it together?
Sasakthi: We were bored during COVID lockdowns and started brainstorming interesting problems to solve. Buddhika came up with the idea of dubbing video content after not being able to watch the 3rd season of Borgen since the voice actors required to dub it couldn’t meet in the studio, and I was excited about the opportunity to work on some really hard and impactful problems. We both saw the potential value, but wanted to make sure that we did it the right way, so we were very intentional about how we developed the team to make sure that we established a culture of respect, friendship, collaboration, and curiosity.
Buddhika: Dubbing had a transformative impact on me as a child. TV was introduced in Sri Lanka when I was still a toddler and I didn’t speak English. All the content initially available was in English, so TV was little more to me than a magical box with people inside. But, gradually more and more content from around the world was dubbed into the language I spoke, Sinhala. Shows like “Towards 2000” and “That’s Incredible!” became accessible and sparked my interest in technology.
There’s a shift with knowledge moving from written form to video. As mobile phone use increases that knowledge is theoretically accessible to more and more people through platforms like YouTube, but language remains a barrier. We’re super excited about the prospect for Aloud to bridge that gap.
“Gradually more and more content from around the world was dubbed into the language I spoke, Sinhala. Shows like “Towards 2000” and “That’s Incredible!” became accessible and sparked my interest in technology.”
Read the full Article
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/meet-aloud-ai-co-creators/