Russia’s tech giant Yandex has added a new automatic English to Russian translation dub function to its Yandex Browser arsenal, which can be activated on YouTube and beyond, according to a company press release.
“To completely erase language barriers on the internet is one of our biggest challenges. We set about solving it back in 2011 and now can translate all the main types of content: text, images and video. We will later add new translation pairs for use with video, as well as new voices, helping people learn and enjoy themselves while doing it,” Yandex told VC.ru.
The translation dub consists of Russian male and female voices, superimposed onto the original audio.
The dubbing is achieved with the aid of a neural network that recognizes speech and spits out text and complete sentences. The system determines the gender of the speaker, translates the sentence into Russian, synthesizes the appropriate voice and syncs the resulting audio with the video.
The technology can already be used with YouTube, Vimeo and a number of other video streaming websites. All you need to do is download Yandex Browser, find a video to watch and hit the Перевести (“translate”) button. Give it a few minutes, depending on the length of the video.
The function, however, doesn’t work with paid websites, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Online users in Russia were happy with the release and had a few questions and suggestions of their own, including, but not limited to: “Will PornHub be added to the list of services?” One user joked that Yandex’s new project is “designed to make all foreigners speak Russian. Nothing personal, it’s only business”.
Here’s a sample of Yandex’s new intelligent system going to work on ‘Blood and Concrete’ (1991), just for laughs!
The dub function is available in Yandex.Browser for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Android, as well as the Yandex app for Android and iOS.