Setup, troubleshooting, billing, and everything about dubbing YouTube videos into your language.
EarDub is a free Chrome extension that dubs YouTube videos into your native language. It extracts the video's captions, translates them with AI, generates natural-sounding speech, and plays it in sync with the video. You can dub into Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, or English with 28+ voices.
Install EarDub from the Chrome Web Store with the "Add to Chrome" button, then open or refresh any YouTube tab. EarDub officially supports desktop Google Chrome; other Chromium browsers such as Edge may work but are not yet officially tested. No account or sign-up is required.
Open a YouTube video that has captions, then click the EarDub button in the player's control bar (next to the settings gear). The first dub takes a moment to generate: captions are extracted, translated, and converted to speech. Choose your dubbing language and voice in the extension popup before or after clicking.
EarDub dubs into 6 languages: Mandarin Chinese (10 voices), Cantonese (3), Taiwanese Mandarin (3), Japanese (4), Korean (4), and US English (6). Source videos can be in any language that has captions; automatic language detection works best with English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish videos.
The free plan includes 5 dubbed videos per day, with each video up to 180 minutes long. All voices, bilingual subtitles, and audio mixing are included. The quota resets daily. When today's quota is used up, the dubbing button tells you so instead of failing silently, and dubbing works again the next day.
EarDub uses neural text-to-speech voices, the same class of voices used by professional narration tools, not the robotic system voices older extensions rely on. Each language offers multiple voices with different tones. If a voice does not fit the video, switch to another one in the extension popup; the change applies to the next sentences immediately.
Open the extension popup and use the two volume sliders: one controls the original video's soundtrack, the other controls the dub. Lower the original to around 10 to 30 percent to keep the speaker's energy in the background, or set it to 0 to hear only the dub. Both settings are remembered for future videos.
Dubbing follows the video's word-level timestamps, and sentences always play to completion: EarDub never cuts speech mid-word. When a translated sentence runs longer than the original, playback speeds up gently (up to 1.45x) to catch up. If you drag the progress bar, the dub re-aligns to the new position automatically.
Not yet. YouTube captions do not contain speaker identity, so EarDub cannot tell who is talking and uses your selected voice for everyone. This is a limitation of all caption-based dubbing tools. Distinguishing speakers requires audio-level analysis, which is on our research roadmap but not promised for a specific date.
Yes at normal speeds. The dub follows the video timeline, so 1x to 1.25x works well. At higher speeds the translated speech may not physically fit into each sentence's time window, so parts can be skipped to keep up. For dubbed viewing we recommend staying at 1.5x or below.
Work through this list, which resolves most reports: 1. Refresh the YouTube tab (always needed right after installing). 2. Confirm the video has captions: check the CC button in the player. 3. Check whether today's 5-video free quota is used up in the extension popup. 4. Update Chrome to the latest version and make sure EarDub is enabled in chrome://extensions. 5. If it still fails, send us the video URL via the feedback page; that lets us reproduce the exact problem.
EarDub builds the dub from the video's captions, so a video with no captions at all cannot be dubbed yet. Most popular videos have at least auto-generated captions, which work fine. If the CC button is missing entirely, the creator disabled captions and YouTube generated none. Speech-recognition support for caption-less videos is planned.
Generation time grows with video length: a 10-minute video typically takes well under a minute, while a 2-hour video takes several. If it seems frozen: refresh the tab and click the button again (already-generated audio is reused, so you lose nothing), check your network or VPN stability, and confirm your daily quota is not exhausted. If one specific video always hangs, send us its URL.
No meaningful impact in normal use. The heavy work (translation and speech generation) happens on EarDub's servers, not in your browser; the extension only plays the finished audio and draws subtitles. It loads exclusively on youtube.com pages and stays completely idle on every other website.
No. The extension's content script is restricted to youtube.com, so it cannot read, modify, or slow down any other site. This is enforced by Chrome's permission system, not just by our code: you can verify the site access scope yourself in chrome://extensions under EarDub's details.
No. EarDub works immediately after installation with no registration, no email, and no login. The daily free quota is tracked by an anonymous identifier stored in your browser. Optional accounts are coming later for settings sync and Pro subscriptions, and the extension will keep working without one.
The free quota of 5 videos resets every day. A video counts when you generate a new dub for it. Pausing, seeking, and continuing to watch an already-dubbed video does not consume additional quota. Each video can be up to 180 minutes long; longer videos are not supported yet on any plan.
The Pro plan has not launched yet, so there is nothing to cancel today. When it launches: cancellation will be self-serve from this site (no emails or chats required), it takes effect at the end of the paid period, and the refund policy will be published in plain language before we charge anyone. The free plan never requires payment details.
To generate a dub, the video's caption text is sent to our servers for translation and speech synthesis, and the resulting audio is cached so repeat views are instant. EarDub does not read your browsing history, does not track you outside youtube.com, and does not sell data. Settings like voice and volume are stored locally in your browser.
Yes, in three ways. First, some videos include extra audio tracks: click the settings gear, then "Audio track". Second, subtitles: enable captions and pick an auto-translated language. Third, a dubbing extension like EarDub, which speaks the translation aloud in sync and works on any captioned video, even when the first two options are missing.
YouTube rolled out automatic AI dubbing and now enables it by default on many channels, so the platform may auto-select a dubbed track based on your language settings. Many viewers find the default voice robotic. To get the original audio back, open the player's settings gear, choose "Audio track", and select the original language.
Per video: click the settings gear in the player, open "Audio track", and choose the original language track. As of mid-2026 YouTube offers no reliable account-wide switch to disable auto-dubbing everywhere, which is a common complaint. If you want dubbing only when you ask for it, with a voice you choose, that is exactly the control EarDub gives you.
YouTube's official auto-dubbing only exists where the creator's channel has the feature enabled, the language pair is supported, and the video meets duration limits. Most videos on YouTube have no official dub at all. EarDub does not depend on any of those conditions: it works on every video that has captions, manual or auto-generated.
Subtitles preserve the original voices but chain your eyes to the bottom of the screen, which is tiring for long videos and useless while multitasking. Dubbing lets you absorb content by listening, like a podcast. With EarDub you do not have to choose: it plays the dub and can show bilingual subtitles at the same time, with the original voice mixed underneath at any volume.