Indians may get to watch YouTube videos in multiple languages soon

MUMBAI: Keeping in mind the multi-lingual society of India, YouTube has decided to take steps to make its videos more inclusive. The video-sharing platform announced at the 'Google for India' event that it is testing a new feature which lets the user switch audio tracks in a variety of languages, as per a report by US-based tech portal TechCrunch.

"Video is a particularly effective format for sharing health information in ways that are accessible and digestible not only to a professional audience but to everyone.

We want to help truly democratize important health information. And, we remain committed to working closely with experts in healthcare and investing in technologies that will enable them to create multilingual content efficiently, to reach audiences at scale," TechCrunch quoted Ishan John Chatterjee, the director of YouTube India.

At present, the feature is only available to a handful of healthcare videos, which have language options in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Marathi. Videos containing multilingual audio will have an option named "Audio Track" within the settings button consisting of a list of languages which are available for the clip.

However, no visual marker denoting the videos with multilingual audio would appear in search results, as per TechCrunch. In addition to this, Google also announced that it is in progress to start testing its upcoming dubbing product 'Aloud' with a few creators.

The product, which was originally made by the Area 120 accelerator, assists creators in transcribing, translating and dubbing original content in numerous languages.

The company made it clear that the tool would initially be available only with a 'small group of healthare providers'. However, no mention was made of the languages this dubbing product would be working for.