🌍 AI Dubbing Tools: What 175 Languages Actually Costs

The pitch is that you record once and reach every market. The reality is that you are about to publish audio in a language you cannot hear mistakes in, which is a different kind of risk than anything else in an AI pipeline. That does not make dubbing a bad idea. It makes proofreading a line item.

By the numbers#

• ElevenLabs: around $0.18/min for audio dubbing, 29 languages, strongest on voice fidelity
• HeyGen: roughly 50 minutes for $24 on Creator (about $0.48/min used fully), 175+ languages, lip-synced video
• Rask: about $50 for 25 minutes, $0.60 per overage minute, up to 130 languages
• The three do not compete on the same product: audio-only dubbing, lip-synced video, and language breadth are separate purchases

Three tools, three different products#

This category gets reviewed as though everyone is building the same thing, and they are not. ElevenLabs is a voice company: what you get is a convincing voice in another language, and it is the best of the three at sounding like a person rather than a synthesis. HeyGen is a video company: the mouth moves with the new audio, which matters enormously if your face is on screen and matters not at all if it is a voiceover over b-roll. Rask is a coverage play: more languages attempted than either.

So the first question is not which is best. It is whether your footage has a talking head in it. If it does, audio-only dubbing leaves you with a mouth saying English shapes over Portuguese words, and viewers notice that within a sentence. If it does not, you are paying a lip-sync premium for nothing, and the voice-fidelity option is the better spend. Our lip sync accuracy breakdown covers where that mouth-tracking actually holds up and where it drifts.

So what: decide talking-head or not before you compare a single price.

The per-minute number needs unpacking#

A rate of $0.18/min and a rate of $0.48/min are not measuring the same work. The cheaper one is generating audio. The dearer one is generating audio and re-timing a face to it. Comparing them directly is the same mistake as comparing a per-second video price without accounting for retakes, which we walk through in the cost-per-finished-shot breakdown.

Watch the allowance structure too. HeyGen's figure only holds if you consume the bundled minutes; use ten of fifty and your effective rate is five times worse. Rask's overage rate is the number that will actually bite, because dubbing volume is lumpy: you translate a back catalogue in one week and nothing for a month. Price the month you go long, not the average.

What breaks, and it is rarely the audio#

The failure modes are boring and expensive. Idioms translate literally and land oddly. Product names get "translated" when they should have been left alone. Numbers and units survive but the phrasing around them turns formal in a way that reads like a manual. Timing stretches, so a tight 45-second script becomes 58 seconds in German and no longer fits your edit.

None of that shows up in a quality benchmark, and none of it is fixable by picking a better tool. It is fixable by having one native speaker watch the output once before it ships. For a channel publishing casually, skipping that is a reasonable risk. For anything client-facing or monetised, it is the difference between localisation and embarrassment.

So what: budget a native-speaker pass per language, once, before the first publish in that language.

The consent question nobody puts on the pricing page#

Dubbing your own voice into another language is straightforward. Dubbing someone else's is not, and the tools will let you do it without asking whether you should. A cloned voice speaking words the person never said is the same right-of-publicity problem covered in our AI cover song piece, just wearing a business suit. If the voice belongs to a client, a colleague, or an interview subject, get that in writing before you generate, not after someone asks.

The workflow that avoids rework#

Do it in this order and you spend the least. Lock your final edit first, because a re-cut after dubbing means re-dubbing every affected segment and you pay per minute twice. Then dub one language as a pilot, put it in front of a native speaker, and fix whatever the pass reveals in your source script rather than in the output. Idioms and product names almost always need handling upstream; changing them once in the script fixes them in every language you go on to produce.

Only then run the rest. Creators who dub eight languages simultaneously on the first attempt discover the same script problem eight times and pay to regenerate all of it. The pilot costs one language and saves seven.

There is also a distribution question worth settling early. Separate audio tracks on one video, or separate uploads per language? Separate uploads give each language its own title, description and thumbnail to rank with, which is usually the better discovery play, and it means one bad dub does not sit on your main asset. It also multiplies your upload and moderation work by the number of languages, so decide before you generate rather than after.

So what: lock the edit, pilot one language, fix the script, then scale.

Where I land#

If your face is on camera, HeyGen earns the premium, because unsynced lips undo everything else you did well. If it is voiceover, ElevenLabs sounds the most like a person and costs the least per minute. Rask is the answer when you need a language the other two do not reach, which is a real and specific reason rather than a general one.

And whichever you pick: listen to the output. In a language you speak, you would never publish a take without hearing it back. Dubbing tempts you to break that habit precisely when the stakes are highest.