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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

The auto-dub feature is madness. I noticed it first a couple of days ago, I'm crossing my fingers that few authors choose to enable it, and that YouTube makes it easy to disable as a default in settings (not currently possible, you have to do it as you watch, every time).

I'm in a Spanish speaking country, but I want to watch English videos in English.

Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I want to listen to the original voices!

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It is enabled by default. One creator of English language content had their video misclassified as Spanish and people were getting a machine English dub on an English video. Support to fix it appears to be a nightmare.

Wait, do you mean it's enabled by default but the author can disable it?

If not, I wonder why I can still watch most videos in their original language (even though I'm in a Spanish-speaking country), and I only encountered this once so far.

There is supposed to be a procedure to manually remove each language dub but it was broken (at least as of last year).

It's being gradually rolled out to channels. Will likely hit larger ones earlier, or following some other metric youtube is following.

I don't want it dubbed whether I speak the language or not.

Yes, this is what I mean. I NEVER want it dubbed.

I'd rather use auto-generated subtitles (even if flawed), but I want to hear the original voices!

What about the auto translated titles? It also happens for chapters in the video...

Sames languages as you. It drives me nuts because the translations are almost always wrong.

This “feature” amazes me. It is badly done and a bad idea. I haver never watched a dubbed video so why show me a translated title? It’s also surprising, Google has plenty ESL employees on staff.

There has to be some KPI tied to how often the AI model is used in production for providing translations on YouTube etc. Someone's promotion hangs on the translation feature being used as often as possible on YouTube.

Comments are quite good at pointing out when the creator has accidentally left it on (it is of course enabled by default and authors have to actively disable it).

> Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I want to listen to the original voices!

The first time I saw this feature, it was on a cover of some pop song in a foreign language. Why on Earth... ?

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