Prime Video Is Testing Out AI Dubbing on Movies and Shows

Want to make steam come out of a cinephile’s ears? Open up the debate of which is superior, dubbing or subtitles, and come down on the opposing side. Your opinions and preferences go out the window if a title is only available on one or the other.

What are you going to do? Not watch it? What’s worse is when there’s a juicy show or an internationally renowned movie that isn’t available in your language with either subtitles or dubbing. It’s expensive to translate a new show to a new language.

In steps Amazon with a pilot project whereby they’re using AI to dub certain shows in English and Latin American Spanish. It’s live now, but Amazon is keeping it to just a few shows and movies that don’t have any subtitles or dubbing. Could it be the wave of the future to bring more foreign-language films and series to market, or a creeptastic, dystopian sideshow?

a very limited roll-out

“To make its vast streaming library accessible to even more customers, Prime Video will begin offering AI-aided dubbing on licensed movies and series that would not have been dubbed otherwise,” Amazon wrote in an explainer.

Only 12 titles, both movies and TV series, are included in the experiment for now, although if it proves successful with viewers Amazon will likely expand it to further titles.

Adding subtitles to a show or film is relatively easy. There’s some art performed by the writer to convey the emotion and mood of the original dialogue, so it’s not a straight-up word-for-word translation.

But in the grand scheme of things, films, and television shows are often translated into other languages by way of subtitles because of cost concerns. It’s a lot cheaper and quicker than hiring a cast of people to perform all the spoken dialogue in a show, clean up the audio, and then sync it to the scenes.

AI dubbing is live as of right now, and you can check it out if you stumble across one of the shows that feature in the initial public offering, such as El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora, and Long Lost. Let us know if it goes over better than when Netflix skeeved everyone out last December by using AI to not just dub the dialogue but also morph the mouths of actors on La Palma. Blech.