You’ve probably seen cool clips of Taylor Swift speaking Chinese, or Lex Fridman speaking Hindi done using AI. The demos look very impressive, but in reality it’s quite difficult to get those levels of results without human interventions. AI can get about 90% of the thing right, but the last 10% of small mistakes can really break the viewing experience! So, that's where AI dubbing studios like Dubbie come in.

An AI dubbing studio is like a video editor designed specifically for AI dubbing. It provides easy to use UI that lets you edit the translation, regenerate audio, and move segments around to fix the AI's mistakes. There are actually quite a few good dubbing studios out there including Rask.ai and ElevenLabs.io. They both have decent UI, large voice libraries, voice cloning, and just about everything you need. But the only thing is that they charge around $2/min.

$2/min is not that expensive considering that human dubbers are ~$15/min. But it's definitely out of my budget for non-business usecases. Maybe I want to dub a Huberman video on aging and send it to my Chinese parents. That'll be $30. Or I’ll watch a cool Chinese video and want to send it to my English friends. Another $20. Without factoring the manual work that I'll have to do in order to dub it good enough in the first place…

That was the main motivation behind Dubbie. An open-source AI dubbing studio that costs $0.1/min - about 10-30x cheaper than competitors on the market. Which is just slightly above how much it'll cost us to run the service.(Hopefully we won't lose money on this lol) Dubbie is not designed to compete with tools mentioned above which are tailored towards enterprises/business. Instead, Dubbie is here for those content that may never be translated due to the current high cost.

Hopefully in a few years(or months lol), AI will get good enough to one shot dubbing for dirt cheap and we won’t need dubbing studios anymore. But until then, Dubbie is our little attempt to take down a few bricks of the language barrier! If you resonate with any of those things written above, please give us a star on Github or join our Discord server to chat more! We'd love to have you as a part of the community.