AI dubbing is a trendy and powerful process where Artificial intelligence is utilized to translate and replicate dialogues in different languages. In this scenario, AI has been trained to simulate traditional human voices to produce original and human-like content in a pre-recorded or even real-time setting.
With the advancement of AI technology, some companies like StoryShell also offer fine-tuning the voice of each speaker. This option can help create hundreds of original voices, by just playing with the tune settings, and adjusting the deepness, or pronunciation of each voice.
What is traditional dubbing?
Traditional dubbing is an old-fashioned process, in which an individual or multiple voice actors are manually recording audio content on a target language. This method helps to create dubbed content on multiple languages, aimed to reach a wider target audience.
The only difference in this approach is the requirement to translate the script, and re-recording of the content to match the target language for localization.
AI Dubbing vs Traditional Dubbing Comparison
Each type of dubbing has its pros and cons, compared to one another. To find, which could prove to be the better option, we are going to review the pricing, time spent, scalability, quality, and personal touch.
While these comparisons only touch the surface of traditional and AI dubbing, they could give a great overview, which would work best for every individual.
Price comparison
Traditional dubbing is a very expensive process, which requires an operating team, and professional audio systems. Along with these, voice actors are also required, and their dubbing skills vary in pricing. Nonetheless, a rental studio is always the preferred choice when it comes to dubbing, so sound quality can be preserved.
On average traditional dubbing costs are anywhere from $50 to $500 per minute, and it depends on the quality of equipment, team skills, and the voice actor you are hiring.
For AI dubbin the costs are relatively small, for a wide variety of reasons. Since an artificial intelligence model will be translating your content, there will be no need for voice actors, or any equipment.
On top of that, if you wish to hire a video editing professional, you are looking to pay anywhere between $1,20 to $5 per minute of work. To avoid such high costs, you could trim the quality of the editing, and use a freelancer to make the edits, putting costs down to an average of $2,20 per minute of work.
If we also take the price of $0,4 per minute with AI dubbing software, you are looking to pay an average price of $2,60 per minute of content, without compromising the quality.
Time spending
Traditional dubbing could be a very time-consuming process, which solely depends on the complexity of the project and its requirements. On average, it takes 6 to 12 weeks of time to traditionally dub a movie, or around 8 hours to dub a 20-minute episode of a small anime with fewer conversations.
Compared to traditional dubbing, AI dubbing takes only a fraction of the time required to fully translate any audio content to the target language. A reason for this is the training method of the AI MLM, which is learned to imitate human-like behavior and translate sentences in a human-like manner.
Scalability
Scalability often relies on the project budget, the stamina of voice actors, and the complexity of the project required to be dubbed. As mentioned earlier, the traditional dubbing method requires a large amount of time for script translation, proofreading, and recording. Dubbing in more than 1 language could become a very expensive and time-consuming activity.
On the other hand, the AI dubbing method eliminates any need for translations, recordings, or even hiring an extra working hand, as the AI will handle the heavy lifting. For projects requiring dubbing in multiple languages, the heavy loads of work could easily be handled, and will still be cheap compared to its alternative.
Quality and Personal Touch
Traditional dubbing is a quality process, which allows voice actors to rehearse and refine their acting ability for their roles. This method lets them grasp the role on a deeper level, and create an outstanding performance, which brings a personal touch to the crowd.
For example, drama movies often contain moments, which touch the heart and cause the audience to shamble in tears. This is due to the actors' professionalism in the role, and oftentimes influences people to have a bigger interest in the play.
For AI dubbing, this process is a bit different, as most of the MLMs have not been trained to improvise or create touching moments for their target crowd. A reason for this is the lack of emotions in the AI used, but many of the companies like StoryShell, work on training their AI models to imitate human emotions when instructed to.
However, compared in quality, both AI Dubbing vs Traditional Dub can create a quality performance, but in different case scenarios.
Is AI Dubbing Better Than Traditional Dubbing?
Comparing AI dubbing to traditional dubbing is like comparing apples to oranges in most cases. While these 2 methods of content localization have a similar goal, their practice solely relies on the purpose of the content.
For example, AI-dubbed content is perfect for content such as corporate training materials, social media content, and similar. On the other hand, traditionally dubbed content is far more useful for movies or plays, which adopt emotional scenes.
As of the moment AI dubbing comes with pros and cons, but with the everlasting evolution of technology, MLMs continuously train to overcome these hurdles.