YouTube Shorts get artificial voiceover as a new feature for creatives

YouTube has announced a series of new functions for its short videos. These are intended to simplify the creation of short videos and offer new opportunities for creators. Content creators will be able to convert their longer videos into shorts more easily and a new text-to-speech function will allow artificial speech to be added to short videos as a voiceover.

These features make YouTube Shorts increasingly similar to the market leader for short videos, TikTok. On TikTok, you often hear surprisingly robotic-sounding voiceovers in videos advertising something. The process for adding voiceovers to a video is also strikingly similar to TikTok.

For shorts, YouTube provides Create as an app with AI tools for video production. After the creator has entered a text for the short video, the artificially generated voiceover is added using the "Add Voice" button in the top left-hand corner of the screen. There are currently four different voices to choose from. However, TikTok offers more voices for its voiceover function.

New: video shortening, subtitles and Minecraft effects

YouTube also describes the function for generating shorts from longer videos. A new function called "Auto Layout" helps to automatically track the subject or main object of the video when transforming it into an upright video. It is kept in the center while the video zooms and pans during the conversion.

YouTube Shorts will soon roll out automatically generated subtitles in various designs, so that an external app is no longer required for this function. Different fonts and colors can be selected. The video service has also introduced new Minecraft effects for YouTube Shorts, such as backgrounds that match the game and a mini-game called "Minecraft Rush". In this game, blocks have to be removed as quickly as possible. This can be recorded so that you can compete with others for the best time.

With the new functions, YouTube Shorts aims to improve its position in competition with TikTok. YouTube is taking over some of TikTok's interesting functions from Google's point of view, while TikTok is constantly increasing the length of videos originally designed for 30 to 60 seconds in order to somewhat attack YouTube's core business. In the meantime, TikTok has increased the video length to up to ten minutes.

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