[dragontamer]

Can YouTube stop shoving terrible robot-English AI dubs down my throat?

I once looked up a German language test. It was auto-AI dubbed into English. Ugggghhhhh..... There are also a lot of anime where the AI dub essentially removes the music and sound effects and leaves only a dreary AI voiceover. It's kinda crazy that Google is pushing this feature out....

[chrsw]

There's no way to switch back to the original audio track? I agree you shouldn't have to but I'm wondering if it's possible.

[johneth]

You can change the audio track back to the original.

Not sure if it remembers your preference, though, so if it doesn't that probably grates.

[jeroenhd]

It doesn't remember my preference. Or rather, it seems to remember me picking a specific language, and then loads the dub in that language next time I click a video. It doesn't remember "don't duh videos".

[oblio]

It does remember it. At least on Firefox/Linux.

[retired]

Not if you Airplay to your TV. I get random foreign languages when I watch English speaking YouTubers. No way to enable subtitles or change the language. It's a known bug according to the internet.

[Findecanor]

There are several Chrome extensions for turning that off automatically, but I agree: you should not have to need extensions to use YouTube.

[Jubijub]

You can configure your preferred languages in YT settings, so it doesn’t do that. The setting is obscure, but it’s there

[elashri]

The problem is that it doesn't even respect this choice. My native language is not English and most of the videos in this languages will be auto transcript to English. Even the last time I changed both the language and country and YouTube still managed to auto transcript to English.

The solution is a simple toggle to turn it off, not pushing it to our throat.

[rtsil]

That just tells it which languages to serve if the video has multiple tracks, including Ai-generated ones. "Keep original language" should be the default, or at least an opt-in.

And what about the atrocious title auto-translations? I'm in France, my browser is set to accept EN-us and FR-fr as languages, and my Youtube is in EN. And yet it keeps auto-translating the titles of some French videos. And the translation is so awful, it mistranslates many things and translates literally some obvious puns, that I can't believe they're using Gemini for this. They must have repurposed a 5-year old version of Google Translate. It is not consistent either, the titles are translated in the home page, but not in the channel's page.

[bethekidyouwant]

I don’t know that Settings -> languages is obscure

[bethekidyouwant]

Settings -> languages and then add German as one of the languages you know and it’ll never do this again

[dragontamer]

I don't know German. That's why I'm looking up German language tests.

[Buildstarted]

try this. https://gist.github.com/Buildstarted/c6b156ec95dc012c5f3dc5e...

[1e1a]

Even worse, sometimes it dubs ads, where there's no way to switch the audio track and no way to see if it's being dubbed. This also makes it look like the dubbed audio is the original audio from the ad, which makes the advertiser look terrible.

[sheept]

It's an option that individual channels can disable. Granted, it's opt-out, but YouTube emailed creators several times about it well before:

> Effective today, you can turn off automatic dubbing for your entire channel in your Channel settings > Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic dubbing.

> Once auto-dubbing is enabled for your channel, while uploading a new video, you will also have the option to turn off automatic dubbing for that video.

So if you're seeing auto dubbing on a video by a creator who clearly pays attention to YouTube's algorithm and should be aware of the feature, then they deliberately opted to leave the option on, probably thinking that it can't hurt.