DUBAI: YouTube has unveiled several AI-powered tools, to be rolled out over the next year, to help creators enhance their content with videos or images.
The tools were showcased at the platform’s annual event “Made on YouTube” on Thursday.
“The creativity of content creators on YouTube across the Middle East and North Africa is truly inspiring and we’re excited to see how they will leverage YouTube’s new AI-powered features to continue pushing the boundaries of creative expression,” Tarek Amin, director of YouTube in MENA, told Arab News.
Since the launch of Shorts in 2020, the short-form content format has been capturing audiences’ attention, garnering over 70 billion daily views globally.
To make Shorts even more appealing for creators, YouTube announced the launch of Dream Screen, an experimental feature that allows creators to add AI-generated video or image backgrounds to their Shorts simply by typing an idea into a prompt.
“Given the mobile-first creator and audience for Shorts, it made sense for Dream Screen to start there,” a YouTube spokesperson told Arab News, adding that the feature would be developed further based on community feedback.
YouTube Studio will use generative AI to help creators brainstorm and come up with ideas based on audiences’ viewing habits and content interests. The insights will be personalized for each channel or creator, YouTube said.
The company has been testing early versions of AI-powered tools in YouTube Studio with creators, and more than 70 percent of those surveyed said it has helped them develop and test ideas for videos.
For now, the feature will be deployed experimentally in the US later this year, and will be expanded to other creators next year, the spokesperson said.
YouTube also launched YouTube Create, a production and editing mobile app for creators. Early tests were conducted in India and Singapore, and the app is currently in beta for creators in the US, UK, France, Germany, South Korea and Indonesia.
It is currently available only on Android devices but is expected to launch on iOS next year.
The company also announced other products and features including an AI-powered music recommendation system that will take a written description of a creator’s video and suggest which soundtrack matches best, as well as an AI dubbing feature that will allow creators to dub their videos into other languages.
The latter is powered by Aloud, which is part of Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator for experimental projects.
It currently supports dubbing from English to Portuguese and Spanish.
The YouTube spokesperson told Arab News: “Translation and transcription quality is different across languages; we will increase language coverage — including starting from a non-English source — as we gain higher confidence over the translation and transcription accuracy of the dubs.”
