Hey HN!I love watching YouTube with my 7-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, the best stuff is often in English (we're German). So I made an AI tool that translates videos directly, using the original voices. All other sounds, as well as background music, are preserved, too.Turns out that it works for many other language pairs, too. So far, it can create dubs in English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian, German, Italian, Korean, Polish and Dutch.The main challenge in building this was to get the balance right between translating the original meaning and getting the timing right. Especially for language pairs like English -> German, where the target ist often longer than the source ("bat" -> "Fle-der-maus", "speed" -> "Ge-schwin-dig-keit").Let me know what you think! :)
Users criticized the Show HN product for potentially harming language learning, with specific concerns about dubbing affecting English proficiency and the pedagogical wisdom of using dubs. Subtitles were criticized for poor timing, revealing too much, and being too fast for children. There were also complaints about the lack of support for all languages, the high cost, and the need for manual adjustments in automatic dubbing. The product was seen as lacking originality, with unclear unique selling points. Concerns about copyright issues, the lack of a local version, and the absence of certain language options like Ukrainian were also mentioned.