Google For India 2022: YouTube Videos To Be Available In Multiple Languages

At Google For India 2022, the eighth edition of the keystone event the tech major conducts in India, the company announced that certain videos on YouTube will now be available in multiple languages.

The new feature will primarily be focused on healthcare content on YouTube and might be expanded to other forms of content.

The users will be able to change the audio language within a YouTube video to either English, Hindi, Marathi or Punjabi. Videos with multilingual content will have an option called ‘Audio Track’ under the settings button on YouTube, which will have a list of available audio languages for the video.

However, there are no visual indications within the user interface which might differentiate the multilingual content. Therefore, the user will have to look for that specific option in the settings for every YouTube video, which is a bit counterintuitive.

Healthcare content on YouTube is getting multilingual support first due to its popularity in India. According to Google’s figures, health condition videos on YouTube in India received over 30 Bn views in 2021.

Google also announced that it is working with a set of creators to test its dubbing product called ‘Aloud’. The product helps content creators transcribe, translate and dub the original content in multiple languages. 

Aloud was created by Area 120 accelerator and Google said it was making Aloud available to a small group of healthcare providers. Although, Google did not specify the languages Aloud supports at the moment. The tech giant also said that the videos with multilingual support may or may not have been created via Aloud – some content creators might just have dubbed the videos themselves.

YouTube is also partnering with more healthcare organisations in India, including Narayana, Manipal, Medanta and Shalby, to have more healthcare content in regional languages such as Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati and Bengali.

In a statement, Ishan John Chatterjee, YouTube India’s director, said, “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 democratise 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,” Chatterjee added.

YouTube is one of Google’s biggest products in India. According to Google, YouTube helped contribute more than INR 10,000 Cr to the Indian economy, directly supporting 7.5 Lakh equivalent jobs in 2021.

Google also made other announcements on healthcare. Google Lens will now support reading doctors’ prescriptions for making them more accessible to users while the company itself is partnering with Apollo Hospitals in India to build a clinical intelligence platform.

Apart from the healthcare content and multilingual support in videos, YouTube also announced the launch of a learning management system (LMS) style element integrated into the YouTube app called ‘Courses’ for content creators.