Google is testing a powerful new translation service that redubs video in a new language while also synchronizing the speaker’s lips with words they never spoke. It could be very useful for a lot of reasons, but the company was upfront about the possibility of abuse and the steps taken to prevent it.
“Universal Translator” was shown off at Google I/O during a presentation by James Manyika, who heads up the company’s new “Technology and Society” department. It was offered as an example of something only recently made possible by advances in AI, but simultaneously presenting serious risks that have to be reckoned with from the start.
The “experimental” service takes an input video, in this case a lecture from an online course originally recorded in English, transcribes the speech, translates it, regenerates the speech (matching style and tone) in that language, and the...
