Amazon.com Inc. will offer artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted dubbing for a dozen movies and shows on its Prime Video streaming service starting Wednesday in the latest move by a media giant to integrate AI on content.
AI-aided dubbing, the practice of replacing an original audio track with a translated language in English and Spanish, will only be available on Prime’s licensed titles that do not already have dubbing, such as the animated film “El Cid: La Leyenda” (2003).
Amazon said the new feature will take a hybrid approach and allow “local processionals to collaborate with AI to ensure quality control.”
Prime Video, which hopes to build on its more than 200 million customers worldwide by integrating AI into their offerings to improve customer experience, joins a growing list of tech and media companies that have introduced AI-dubbing on their platforms.
Last year, Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN network said it was considering the use of AI to personalize its nightly news highlight show “SportsCenter” to appeal to a younger audience. Meta Platforms Inc. said in September it was testing an AI tool that will automatically translate voices in Reels. And Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube last year released a feature that lets content creators translate their videos into multiple languages.
All three companies plus Amazon are looking at every imaginable way to attract and retain more viewers as AI gains a foothold at work and at home. Prime Video’s foray into AI, for example, dovetails with a larger AI push from Amazon. The company, which has already invested more than $8 billion into Anthropic, this week said its AWS cloud operation has formed a new group focused on agentic AI.
That move, on the heels of agentic AI product news from Salesforce Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. this week, illustrates that Amazon is “on the right track with its focus on developing AI agents within its cloud unit,” Kai Warwzinek, co-founder of Impossible Cloud Network, said in an email. “This is the next real-world application of AI in everyday lives and those that don’t get ahead of this trend will certainly be left behind. In the future, AI agents will likely make up most of the Internet traffic worldwide, so online applications will have to adapt or even be entirely rebuilt to accommodate this shift.”
Added Phil Mataras, founder of decentralized data storage network AR.IO, “Amazon is one of two companies [along with Google] that, largely, control the global Internet. Now as Amazon is pushing for agentic, or autonomous AI, we see a situation where a single company with a single technology could dictate the information that almost everybody in the world consumes.”
