Podcasts on Spotify can be heard in Spanish thanks to automatic dubbing

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Literally just two weeks ago, El Fary and Núñez Feijóo circulated in the chat rooms of Spain speaking admirable English in their own voice. Now, a couple of days ago, Spotify announced that full episodes of podcasts in English will be available dubbed in Spanish, French, German. At the moment there are only a few test examples. Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari speaks extremely fluent Latin Spanish. Suddenly there is, for those interested, a 3-hour interview in Spanish with Harari. It is a test that will continue. There is a curious detail: the chapters translated into Spanish are between 10 and 30 minutes longer than the original. Maybe it’s because of artificial intelligence (AI), maybe because of the structure of the language.

The novelty of Spotify already deserved that we focus on the impact it will have on our linguistic future and cultural consumption. But in recent days Amazon, Meta, OpenAI (and soon Google) have also announced or suggested extraordinary changes to how we will live.

AI was coming for our jobs, but it will end up changing part of our lives. These are just some announcements from these days (some are not absolute novelties, but improvements): you will be able to chat with ChatGPT, which will not only be an advance compared to Alexa or Siri, but there are those who have tried it as therapy (or friend ?) to release emotions after a day of work. In the school’s WhatsApp chat, artificial intelligence can be invoked to summarize hundreds of messages or ask for a message. sticker of a bicycle with heart-shaped wheels and a groundhog on the handlebars for our partner. You will be able to take a photo of the sums in the math book and it will give the results. You will be able to retouch photos on your mobile phone to a level until now reserved for Photoshop experts, and it will be so simple that the difficult part will be finding original photos. It will also explain memes or sequences of images that are not evident to human eyes. Within WhatsApp you can have a conversation with questions that until now we asked Google: for this, Meta has even created chats with celebrities who put their faces to AI experts in recipes, video games, sports or jokes; It seems corny for this time.

These are just some improvised examples. But there is more. Meta announced new RayBans with cameras that will be able to look at a broken faucet and suggest how to repair it with a video that we will see on the glasses themselves. And, of course, we can walk around Cairo or Shanghai, look at street signs or restaurant menus and read them in Spanish on our glasses. It won’t be long before those same glasses translate what they hear in Chinese into Spanish in our ears. This week it was also learned that OpenAI is speaking with Jony Ive, a famous collaborator of Steve Jobs at Apple and now outside the company, to create “the iPhone of AI.” And the mobile phone may no longer be the device with the most convenient size and format for this arsenal of new options.

But what about languages?

I had some things prepared to comment on the end of the Tower of Babel with Spotify. But they already seem secondary to me. It is difficult to imagine the pace of changes that the combination of those innovations that I just listed will bring. The amount of content available is going to multiply. Why not listen to a guide to the corners of Bangkok or Mindanao chosen by some very clever local guys? Why not follow the NBA by listening to specialized podcasts made from Los Angeles or Milwaukee? Why not listen, also in our language, to the latest interview with any world champion (of chess, CounterStrike, minigolf, ballroom dancing)? Of course, in principle not everything will be available in all languages, but it shouldn’t take long; and Spanish will be a priority after English.

The suppression of languages ​​to consume information is a brutal novelty. But that is not the only barrier. Global media, for example, find it difficult to function in another language and outside their area of ​​cultural influence. The major Anglo-Saxon media have never transferred their weight to other languages, although their influence in English is enormous. But Hollywood or Netflix have done it. Tutorials and podcasts are also likely to gain more influence. It is doubtful, however, that the Frenchman Squeezie or the American Kai Cenat will invade the territory of Ibai or Auron. Yes, there may be transfers in all directions, and even more so in the future, when direct messages and chat can be translated at the same time in real time and machines capture new expressions. It is difficult to imagine the concrete impact of this, but it is no longer utopia.

The increase in translations is so imminent that there are already accounts on X that automatically translate the voices of the videos into Spanish with the tone of the original. His level of translation is still fair, but this Wednesday I already saw a clip of Mark Zuckerberg presenting his new glasses in understandable Spanish.

The benefit of learning a language will still be there, I imagine. I speak several and it has been incredibly useful in my life. Will it be the best way to spend learning hours from now on? Don’t know.

From one skyscraper to dozens

We had already commented that ChatGPT seemed to slow down its implementation. Maybe it was just my desire to better understand his adoption. I was wrong a lot and a little at the same time: ChatGPT is still an incredible text generator and little else, but competition is constantly emerging around it. It is as if ChatGPT were the new skyscraper in the global city with its 44 floors and in just a few months other 60-story skyscrapers had been planned everywhere.

Amazon, for example, has just invested 4 billion in Anthropic, the creators of Claude, one of ChatGPT’s main competitors. To better understand the derivatives of AI we have this example that appears in the announcement of that agreement: “Lonely Planet, a famous travel publisher, reduced its itinerary generation costs by almost 80 percent, after implementing Claude 2; synthesizing its decades of travel content to deliver consistent and highly accurate travel recommendations.”

It is impossible for all of this to become everyday at the same time. We are not capable of assuming so much newness. But it will happen. No one will resist creating invented stickers, asking questions in the group chat or consulting recipes with what’s in the fridge instead of resorting to the usual ones on the internet with strange ingredients, or resorting to glasses that tell us which building we’re looking at. Many people will now be thinking: “Nothing, this makes me older, it’s not for me.” Yes, I also resisted cell phones, but there comes a day when resisting is the irrational stance: the new thing is too useful, fun, or your brother-in-law has it.

Meta’s new glasses will cost less than $300 and will go on sale in October. They are Google Glass, yes. but much cooler. They will record and we won’t know. In 2014 there were few cameras on the street and today privacy in public does not exist. If you pick your nose and you are famous (especially in Congress) they can record you. If you fall or crash or get into a fight, you are undoubtedly going to hit the internet.

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