YouTube Shorts adds TikTok-style artificial voices

YouTube has announced a set of new features for YouTube Shorts, some of which are available now, such as a new text-to-speech video narration tool that allows artificial voiceovers to be added. On TikTok, it's those creepy robotic voices you hear a lot on videos with promotional content.

In fact, the process for adding them is very similar to TikTok: after creating some text, you'll tap the new 'add voice' icon, under Shorts, located in the upper left corner of the screen, and select a voice desire. YouTube currently only offers 4 voices to choose from, while TikTok has quite a few options.

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YouTube says it is also rolling out automatically generated captions that users can add to videos without switching to another app like CapCut. Like YouTube Shorts' existing manual text overlay feature, you can change the subtitle style by choosing fonts and colors.

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The company has also added a new set of Minecraft effects - green screen game-themed backgrounds and a mini-game called Minecraft Rush.

These new features are part of a general trend among video platforms. YouTube frequently references TikTok features, such as live video previews in the regular Shorts feed. And TikTok will continue to extend the length of videos. For its part, YouTube's efforts toward TikTok-style Shorts appear to have paid off, for both YouTube and its creators.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 13 July 2024