Refika Birgül, one of the most famous Turkish content creators who shares recipes on her website and YouTube channel, eagerly tried AI dubbing for one of her videos. After uploading the video dubbed by Ollang's AI dubbing technology, she asked her more than 2 million followers for their thoughts on the technology: Does it simplify and enhance our work, or complicate our lives?
Refika considers the importance of speaking the language of her viewers. She adds the English audio track to some of her videos as the speaker herself. This definitely helps her connect with the audience on a more personal level, allowing her followers to hear her own voice and intonation. And yet, with the demand for more content in different languages, not only English, constantly increasing, it is neither efficient nor scalable to pursue this strategy or completely rely on traditional in-studio dubbing.
In Refika’s case, we adopted voice cloning. After several correspondences with Refika and her team, we agreed on the details and decided to use this experimentation as a chance to take the pulse of the public about AI dubbing.
Refika's consent was non-negotiable for cloning her voice. Once we obtained her consent, we began training the AI to clone her voice using a small dataset. In fact, we didn't even ask Refika to provide us with a new record of her voice; but used her existing records. By applying a fast cloning method, we enhanced efficiency and accelerated the process, resulting in quicker delivery times.
Refika’s followers shared their thoughts and feelings about the impact that Refika’s AI voice had on them. Considering the number of comments and engagement from her viewers, it is obvious that people are quite interested in dubbing solutions leveraged by technology, and are very likely to watch a video tailored to different languages with AI dubbing. With that being said, they still prefer Refika herself speaking English in her videos, finding her intonation and accent more engaging and relatable.
Here are some of the comments from her viewers*:
“... [AI dubbing] was smooth but one can not help but compare it to you. I vote for Original Refika - but I guess for business it might reach broader audiences!”
“Great idea, Refika. This will help us to reach more of your recipes!”
“No AI ever could compare to your warm, delighted-about-food, smiley tone of voice. ... It was an interesting try, even if Refika is infinitely better than RefikAI.”
“I love the AI interpretation, and your wonderful personality comes through even with it. Your enthusiasm is contagious!”
“The AI voice-over is interesting, one of the best I've heard for changes in tone. ... a pre-recorded opening from you introducing English speakers to your Turkish content might encourage the AI resistance to give it a try and encourage new viewers to browse around your channel.”
(*Aside from minor edits like correcting typos, the comments are published as they were originally written.)
But why not see it for yourself and watch Refika as AI dubs her content?
At Ollang, we envision a language-free world where stories transcend borders. To realize this vision, we continually enhance Olabs and support content creators and media companies every step of the way in their journey to expand globally. We enable them to create high-quality multilingual video content at affordable prices and with faster turnaround times. Why not empower Refika and other content creators to connect with wider audiences by adapting their videos into multiple languages?
Let us roll up our sleeves and witness how we weave the most engaging storytelling into your content.
