Developer Rebuilds AI Dubbing Pipeline After Learning TTS Was the Easiest Step
A developer upgrading the AI dubbing feature of Katto, a short-video platform, found that switching from Kokoro to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech with Chirp 3 HD was far more complex than a simple API swap. The core challenge was making translated speech fit precisely within the time slots left by the original speaker, since translations often run longer than the source audio. To manage this, the system breaks transcripts into timed phrase segments, uses Claude Haiku to generate shorter, syllable-efficient translations, and synthesizes each phrase individually rather than as a full block. When generated audio still exceeds its allotted slot, FFmpeg's atempo filter speeds it up by up to 1.3x to preserve natural pitch. The upgraded pipeline now supports 19 dubbing languages and 12 voices, with each component chosen because a simpler alternative failed at a specific stage.
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