Amazon announced that its Prime Video is going to offer dubbing on 12 licensed movies and series — dubbing made by AI, that is. Amazon says this is to overcome language barriers, and that so far there are two languages available to dub through artificial intelligence: English and Latin American Spanish. Titles involved include El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora, and Long Lost.
Raf Soltanovich, who is the VP of technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in an official statement, “At Prime Video, we believe in improving customers’ experience with practical and useful AI innovation. AI-aided dubbing is only available on titles that do not have dubbing support, and we are eager to explore a new way to make series and movies more accessible and enjoyable.”
Amazon describes what it’s doing as a hybrid approach, saying that AI will do the dubbing and then “localization professionals” (meaning humans) will go over it to “ensure quality control.” Amazon said this was “the right amount of human expertise.”
While the Amazon press release didn’t mention Japanese animation, anime’s global popularity means it gets dubbed into a lot of languages, and Amazon is interested in streaming more anime. In other words, if this expands, anime might get swallowed up into it so that Amazon can cut costs.
Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini said in 2024, “Right now, one of the areas we are very focused on testing [AI] is our subtitling and closed captioning, where we go from speech to text and how do we improve and optimize our processes where we can get the subtitles done in various languages across the world faster so that we can launch as close to the Japanese release as possible.” In the same interview, he implied that AI dubbing might be down the line as well, saying that the technology just wasn’t there yet.
Anime voice actors have been very vocally against AI dubbing, worried that it will take away their livelihood.
Source: Amazon
_____
Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.