[HN Gopher] Open-source tool translates and dubs videos into oth...
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       Open-source tool translates and dubs videos into other languages
       using AI
        
       Author : oldcai
       Score  : 99 points
       Date   : 2024-08-13 12:15 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | vouaobrasil wrote:
       | Unlike other methods of automation, AI is replacing human beings
       | too fast. And before you say, "new jobs will be created" -- look
       | at history. After the computer, new jobs have been created, but
       | what kind of jobs? Every year, we are becoming more entwined in
       | wage slavery as the wealth accumulates at the top and jobs become
       | more meaningless.
       | 
       | So, no, new jobs will not be created, except the kind of jobs
       | that crush the human spirit into oblivion so that the rich tech
       | oligarchs can play God.
        
         | nickthegreek wrote:
         | >AI is replacing human beings too fast.
         | 
         | citation needed.
        
           | RIMR wrote:
           | This is a subjective statement. If you disagree with it,
           | counter it. Asking for a citation doesn't make sense here.
        
             | chompychop wrote:
             | How is it subjective? Can't terms like "replacing" and
             | "fast" be quantified by metrics related to rates of
             | unemployment and adoption of AI systems for tasks
             | previously manned by humans? I'm not saying the data is
             | readily available, but I do see a route to objectively
             | measuring this.
        
               | bsaul wrote:
               | << It's too sweet >> falls into the same measurable
               | phenomenon, and yet remains highly subjective
        
         | homarp wrote:
         | can't I with that creates video that have the world as
         | potential users?
         | 
         | and the video can be the products, or tutoriala for another
         | products. This allows me to do more, not less.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | Strange submission to post this comment on. It's not like
         | translating and dubbing videos is the highest form of labor.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | It's not like it's mindless drudgery either. Losing as little
           | as possible in translation while fitting within the
           | constraints of subtitles (people can only read so fast) can
           | be very challenging. And decent dubbing tries to
           | approximately match the mouth movements, which puts further
           | constraints on the translation and often requires creative
           | text changes.
           | 
           | There is a point about industry size (not that many countries
           | dub all their movies), but it is one of the intellectually
           | more challenging professions.
        
             | Kiro wrote:
             | Translation work is often associated with horrible working
             | conditions and poor pay. It definitely fits OP's
             | description of "jobs that crush the human spirit into
             | oblivion." This might not be the case if you're a renowned
             | translator of famous literature, but that is not
             | representative of the majority of translators.
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | It actually requires a fair bit of skill to do it correctly
           | and accurately
        
           | surfingdino wrote:
           | There is finesse to it. You are translating from one culture
           | to another.
        
           | notkaiho wrote:
           | Have you tried? It's a genuine "skilled labour" job, both the
           | translation and the voice acting.
        
             | 42lux wrote:
             | In which country? Germany and France put some effort in and
             | it's still not great most of the time but most languages
             | dub only in 1 or 2 voices for all characters. Just look at
             | the ridiculous long credits of Netflix shows.
        
               | evandrofisico wrote:
               | Brazil has a long history of dubbing, not only
               | translating but also localizing tv shows and movies. In
               | some cases the shows are actually better dubbed, because
               | the voice actors are better at emoting than the original
               | cast.
        
               | pizza234 wrote:
               | Italian voice actors are extremely good (although I
               | personally don't like dubbing at all).
        
               | blacksmith_tb wrote:
               | Anime dubs from Japanese into English are often quite
               | good, even idiomatic (I am sure there's some license
               | taken, say for something like <<Kill La Kill>>, but the
               | overall result is much better for it).
        
           | pizza234 wrote:
           | Voice acting (dubbing) _is_ acting, which is a  "high form of
           | labor". In some languages/countries, most of the dubbing is
           | performed by a few extremely good voice actors.
        
             | ZoomerCretin wrote:
             | Watch Squidgame's English dubs and tell me that couldn't be
             | improved.
             | 
             | If for no other reason, this tool is a net-positive because
             | it may raise the bar on the quality of dubs expected from
             | dubbing actors.
        
             | joe_the_user wrote:
             | LLMs aren't going replace all actors or all voice actors
             | just as they won't replace all illustrators or writers.
             | 
             | LLMs provide a certain level of mid/low quality content in
             | nearly all mediums. And given that there many people
             | producing such mid/low quality content today, LLMs will
             | have an impact. LLMs affecting sales writers? Sure (not the
             | best sales writers but the point is sales is mediocre but
             | acceptable is a norm).
             | 
             | And say LLMs specifically. There's good evidence the
             | technology has roughly peaked. That doesn't mean it's
             | impact has peaked but it's indication that "all jobs at
             | risk" might be an exaggeration.
        
           | codedokode wrote:
           | It is a form of art. I hate watching dubbed videos, because
           | the voice actors who translate it almost always are worse
           | than original actors.
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | The problem is that we are hurtling towards the unknown without
         | a plan, driven by the "need" to make higher returns for
         | shareholders and to capture the new market. It may be that some
         | new types of employment magically appear that soak up the jobs
         | lost, but you can be sure there is no one working on solving
         | that problem since the goal is to eliminate labor not create
         | it.
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | I don't think generative AI is replacing humans at all. It's
         | like how SQL replaced software engineers, with added bonus of
         | copyright doubts gatekeeping common folks from exploiting it.
         | It's obviously killing open Internet fast and encouraging power
         | concentration too. It's worst of couples of worlds.
        
         | IndySun wrote:
         | >...new jobs will not be created, except the kind of jobs that
         | crush the human spirit into oblivion...
         | 
         | AI certainly means everyone will be able to create 'art' and as
         | a result we'll have more art than we know what to do with,
         | music and images are already confetti, soon so will full length
         | 'films/movies'. That leaves anyone who can actually sing,
         | paint, play, dance, in prime position to take up those mantles.
        
           | amonith wrote:
           | What do you mean by the last sentence? Isn't it the opposite?
           | People who could do art stuff won't be able to sustain
           | themselves using those skills anymore because those will be
           | devalued a lot.
        
         | pizza234 wrote:
         | This is a fallacy called "Lump of labour fallacy" (see
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy).
        
           | ZoomerCretin wrote:
           | Calling something a fallacy does not mean it truly is one. I
           | have not seen strong evidence that there is not a "lump of
           | labor" in extremely high-rent countries like the US.
           | 
           | For a sufficiently small period of time, there absolutely is
           | a "lump of labor". If I were to go into a county with robots
           | and rent them out to employers for 1/4 of the wage of their
           | current employees, and they all fired their employees and
           | accepted my robots, do you really believe that all of ex-
           | employees would be able to find work again within 6 months?
           | Or even 70% of them? What about their new wages? Do you think
           | these new jobs would pay as well? I have a hard time
           | believing that to be the case.
        
       | cubbic wrote:
       | Oh I made something similar but for Netflix!
       | 
       | https://github.com/cubbK/dubbing_ai_netflix_client
       | 
       | I want to learn swedish and because there are so few dubbed
       | movies in Swedish I take the subtitles(Netflix is good at having
       | subtitles in different languages) and text-to-speech it :)
        
         | sam_perez wrote:
         | How would you rate the quality of the dubs?
         | 
         | Do you think it's usable for learning? Seems like you could end
         | up with some quirky learnings.
        
         | sunnybeetroot wrote:
         | This is fantastic! Any direction on if I wanted to change the
         | language to something else?
        
       | ranger_danger wrote:
       | An English README would have been nice
        
         | pcarion wrote:
         | there is one:
         | 
         | https://github.com/jianchang512/pyvideotrans/blob/main/docs/...
        
         | microflash wrote:
         | Probably you missed it:
         | https://github.com/jianchang512/pyvideotrans/blob/main/docs/...
        
       | netsharc wrote:
       | Huh, if it's good enough, movies/TV shows dubbed with AI-clone of
       | the original voice would be great (if we can ignore the ethics of
       | using the actor's voice and the loss of work for the dubbing
       | companies and actors).
       | 
       | For example here's how weird Friends is in German:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCoNSZV--z0 . Or Italian:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO5qTzvyQ1s
       | 
       | Can AI detect the emotional tone of sentences yet, and recreate
       | it in the target language?
        
         | programjames wrote:
         | Yes, pop in a normalizing flow that removes tone and recreates
         | it with a small audio sample as context.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01479
        
         | devindotcom wrote:
         | they're workin on it
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | Yes, have you used OpenAI's voice model? It uses and reacts to
         | tones
         | 
         | My favorite conversation has been getting it to tell me about
         | marshmallow vs marshmellow spelling and pronunciation, it
         | became very strict but patient with me
         | 
         | It can reply in other languages too, but I cant detect dialect
         | as well to say
        
       | randomgiy3142 wrote:
       | Because translations are copyrighted so it is complex to get
       | legal rights for them.
        
       | CyberDildonics wrote:
       | Is this using an open source text to speech model or is it going
       | out to some other internet service?
        
         | tourmalinetaco wrote:
         | It can use Whisper which is open source, although optionally it
         | can also use GoogleSpeech.
        
           | CyberDildonics wrote:
           | I took a look and that seems to be speech to text / speech
           | recognition but not text to speech.
        
       | lossolo wrote:
       | Based on english doc it seems it's not dubbing but voice over.
        
       | LeoPanthera wrote:
       | For years I've wanted this for live TV. Even just subtitles would
       | be amazing. I've always wanted to be able to watch news TV from
       | other countries.
        
       | alphabetatheta wrote:
       | Some of my friends have been using: https://app.vivalabs.ai/ as a
       | more managed/paid service recently
        
       | cyberax wrote:
       | I would pay a lot for a tool that removes the freaking laugh
       | track from videos.
       | 
       | I just physically can't watch them. I wanted to watch the
       | Blackadder series, but I couldn't even get through one episode.
        
       | mrtksn wrote:
       | Back in high school, when I got my first PC a plumber came over
       | to fix some stuff and when he saw the computer he got excited and
       | asked some questions and one of the questions was "how do you
       | translate the VCD with this, I have a movie to watch but hate
       | subtitles".
       | 
       | I was like "silly dude doesn't know how computers work" but maybe
       | I was the silly one who can't dare to imagine how something like
       | that can work.
        
       | codedokode wrote:
       | As I understand, it first extracts text from original video into
       | subtitles, translates them using external LLM, and then converts
       | text to speech. All of this is done using thrid-party solutions,
       | and the project seems to be just a GUI app that allows to
       | integrate them.
       | 
       | You obviously cannot use this to translate songs or movies
       | because this method loses important information like voice,
       | intonation, etc.
       | 
       | So it is still better to use subtitles.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-13 23:00 UTC)