Frequently Asked Questions

How does this work?

Speakz takes a video in one language and generates a new audio track in another. All of which happens while preserving the original voices of the speakers, as well as other sounds or background music. Just like professionally dubbers, Speakz takes great care to balance meaning, personality and timing to produce natural, authentic translations.

Why did you make this?

I made it because I like watching great YouTube content with my 7-year-old daugther. We're German, but we love documentaries or channels like FrenchGuyCooking or theanatomylab. Being a developer, I thought it would be cool to make a tool that converts any video into German. This way, we don't have to constantly interrupt for me to translate, and we can talk about the content instead. As it turns out, having built this for German, it works for other languages as well.

What languages do you support?

For output, we currently support English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Russian, German, Italian, Korean, Polish and Dutch. For input, we additionally support Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Urdu, Indonesian, Japanese, Swahili, Marathi, Telugu, Turkish, Vietnamese, Tamil, Thai, Gujarati, Ukrainian, Persian, Romanian, Greek, Czech, Swedish, Hungarian, Belarusian, Azerbaijani, Slovak, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Malay, Serbian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Latvian, Estonian, Galician, Armenian, Kazakh, Tagalog (Filipino), Macedonian, Bosnian, Welsh, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Maori, Nepali and Kannada.

How long does it take to translate a video?

I've translated videos from English to German manually in the past. It's usually been a job that takes several hours. Speakz is much faster. Right now, it takes about 2 times a video's length to generate one translation. That means a 30 minute video will take about an hour to process. However, I do see a path towards realtime translation and beyond, as well as streaming.

How can creators use this?

If you're a creator, you can use Speakz to reach more audiences with the content you already have. YouTube supports adding multiple audio tracks to your videos. So if your video is in English, if you add an audio track in Spanish, now your video will show up for Spanish-speaking audiences. With Speakz, you can easily add audio tracks in many languages, and you can do it automatically for all of your videos. If you are a creator and would like to learn more, please click here to join the private beta.

I'm not a creator. Can I use Speakz to translate videos I'd like to watch?

Sure! That's what I originally made it for. Members of my private beta will be able to generate translations for any video. You can select videos from YouTube, or you can upload your own. If you'd like to try it, please join the beta to get access.

Does it work for Podcasts?

Yes.

How much does it cost?

Pricing still is to be determined. But I imagine it'll be around $5 per hour per language. There likely will be discounts for translating the same video into many languages, as well as volume discounts for creators.