YouTube Shorts adds TikTok-style artificial voiceovers

YouTube has announced a set of new features for YouTube Shorts, some of which are available now, like a new text-to-speech video narration that lets you add an artificial voiceover. On TikTok, those are the sometimes startlingly robotic voices that you hear a lot on videos with something to promote.

The process for adding them is a lot like TikTok’s, in fact: after you create some text, you’ll tap a new “add voice” icon that, in Shorts, sits in the upper-left corner of the screen and pick the voice you want. YouTube only offers four voices to choose from at the moment, whereas TikTok has… quite a few more.

YouTube says it’s also rolling out auto-generated captions you can add to a video without switching to another app like CapCut. Like the existing YouTube Shorts manual text overlay feature, you can change the captions’ style using a selection of fonts and colors.

The company has also added a new set of Minecraft effects — a green screen game-themed background and a minigame called Minecraft Rush.