Image: Nick Barclay / The Verge
What if podcasters could flip a switch and instantly speak another language? That’s the premise behind Spotify’s new AI-powered voice translation feature, which reproduces podcasts in other languages using the podcaster’s own voice.
The company has partnered with a handful of podcasters to translate their episodes into Spanish and French with its new tool, and it has plans to roll out German episodes in the coming weeks. The backbone of the translation feature is OpenAI’s voice transcription tool Whisper, which can both transcribe English speech and translate other languages into English. But Spotify’s tool goes beyond speech-to-text translation — the feature will translate a podcast into a different language and reproduce it in a…