YouTube has announced two new product features aimed at creators at the annual Google for India event. The first is called Courses and is launching in India, the US, and South Korea as a beta. It will allow select creators to offer multi-session courses for learning a particular skill and will launch early next year. YouTube says it is already the world’s largest education platform and this will help ensure that creators can offer a more in-depth learning experience. The second feature will bring auto-translation and dubbing to health content from select sources. Courses Courses is being pitched as a new form of monetisation available to creators, where they will be able to offer multi-session video tutorials dedicated to one topic. Users will be able to learn and upskill themselves with the help of these courses. Creators will be able to upload supplementary learning notes such as PDF, PNG files, etc as well as part of the ‘course’ material. “Viewers feel that YouTube can do more to create in-depth learning experiences. And creators also said they need more support to create such content,” Ishan Chatterjee, Managing Director, YouTube India, said at a media briefing ahead of the announcement. According to YouTube, there are eight different ways for monetisation that it offers to creators and Courses will be an addition to this. Creators will have the option of offering their ‘course’ for a select price to audiences, or they can offer it free of cost as well. A free course will be ad-supported. Initially, the Courses option will be limited to select topics and creators. LearnoHub, Speak English With Aishwarya, and Telusko among others will develop courses across academic and vocational subjects in various Indian languages in the beta phase. The topics that YouTube is supporting right now include digital skills such as coding, professional and entrepreneurial skills such as starting a business, and personal passions such as photography. Auto-dubbing on health videos YouTube will also start supporting auto-dubbing with the help of its Aloud feature for select health-related videos. Aloud is a new Google auto-dubbing service powered by machine learning and AI, which can translate and then dub that video into a different language at no extra cost. However, YouTube says only a small group of hospitals, part of an early access program, are currently using Aloud right now. These include hospitals such as Apollo, Max Hospitals, etc which the company had partnered with last year to create authoritative health content for the platform. YouTube says this will ensure users can access the health information in their preferred language. For instance, say there is a video in English by Max Hospitals on the topic of Dengue. A user will be able to toggle to their preferred language, for example in Hindi, from the video’s settings, and the video will automatically be dubbed. The creator or partner would have to select the feature from their side before they upload the video. YouTube is also testing the ability to have a single video with multiple audio tracks across different languages. When asked how YouTube will ensure the accuracy of the translations, the team said the final translation is also double-checked by the creator or partner team as well to ensure there is no mismatch. Creators, in this case, the hospitals, just have to upload their video script onto the Aloud platform, before it is translated and then dubbed. There are five languages supported for now, including Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali.
