[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Tavus (YC S21) - AI-generated personalize...
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Launch HN: Tavus (YC S21) - AI-generated personalized videos for
sales outreach
Hi HN - Hassaan, Quinn & Rishabh here and we're the founders of
Tavus (https://tavus.io/). We generate personalized videos that
realistically imitate your gestures and voice. See a short demo at
https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302 and play with it at
https://tavus.io/playground/. Companies like Loom and Vidyard have
proven the value of personalized videos for sales, onboarding,
marketing, and more. The problem is the time it takes to create a
video for each prospect. We make it scalable by generating
thousands of personalized videos of you in the time it would take
to record one. Our users get the benefits of personalized videos,
like large increases in open and reply rates, without having to
invest all that time. We struggled with LinkedIn outreach and
email marketing at every company we all worked at. It took too many
emails and felt spammy. The best responses we got were from emails
that we wrote specifically for clients we were particularly
interested in. We then tried our hand at video marketing, with
generic videos sent to each lead over LinkedIn, which ultimately
performed much better than any traditional campaigns we ran. What
if we personalized the videos like we personalize emails at scale?
We decided to test that, and the results were incredible. People
loved the fact that we sent natural videos with our own voices and
faces, and we achieved massive increases in demos booked (250%
spike). The sales industry is seeing this shift towards more
individualized video content as well; companies like Loom are
growing rapidly and seeing validating results such as 4x meetings
booked. We also found that these videos perform well outside of
sales and marketing, specifically in recruiting, onboarding, and
customer success. To get started with Tavus, users train an AI
model with their voice and face, by submitting a 15 minute video
recording. Next they set up a base video template(s) that includes
the pitch that they will be giving in the video, along with the
associated branded landing page and video background. Once that is
set up, videos can be generated at the click of a button. One-off
videos can be generated in the Tavus portal, or a CSV can be
uploaded to process videos in bulk. Videos can also be generated
programmatically through the Tavus API. Each video is automatically
personalized in the user's voice for each unique prospect, and can
even automatically generate unique backgrounds, such as a prospects
LinkedIn profile or website. People don't notice imperfections if
the content is interesting to them, and unless you are specifically
looking for artifacts, Tavus videos are practically indiscernible
from a manually recorded video. Therefore our focus is not on
generating the most advanced voice-cloning or lip syncing--plenty
of great researchers can do that way better than we ever could.
Instead it is to provide many immersive personalization options
that cater to the customers' leads. A recruiting company can use
video outreach very differently than a sales company, and so on.
Our core effort is supporting each of those use cases in depth.
Also, people don't trust videos that have professional green-screen
backgrounds, perfect lighting and a voice actor recording for you.
They want to see you, see that you are real, they want to hear your
voice. In our experience, slight imperfections in your video can
actually lead to better outcomes as long as you get the content
right, as they make for a more engaging experience. The point is
not to fool people into thinking that a recording is fully
'natural' but to provide them an immersive experience that is
personally relevant to them. Our revenue is generated from a
subscription model. These subscriptions typically include things
like video strategy consulting, branded landing pages, and a quota
of videos that can be generated per month, We would love to get
your feedback on Tavus, and in particular, hear any ideas you have!
We're super excited about this product, and we've got a lot of work
ahead of us :) Thank you!
Author : rishabhdhar
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-08-02 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
| ctoth wrote:
| Hm I wonder what you originally built this tech for before
| stumbling on this use case.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Wanna take some guesses? :)
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| This is just a sleazy marketing tactic, no matter how you sugar
| coat it.
|
| Do we really need more manipulation in the world?
| hassaanr wrote:
| Sales/marketing can definitely seem unsavory at times. Our
| thought is that these videos aren't much different than a
| personalized email through MailChimp- they just provide a new
| format that is more personable and consumable.
|
| There are also use cases that were working on with tele-health
| companies, allowing providers to send updates that build trust
| with patients that they otherwise wouldn't have time for given
| the scale.
|
| There are a lot of use cases to build more immersive
| experiences!
| verdverm wrote:
| Stuff like this should have a warning label, "generated by a
| machine" or something similar
| hassaanr wrote:
| Interesting point! We're not looking to fool anyone. More so
| we're looking to provide more personalized experiences that
| otherwise weren't possible because of the scalability issue.
| Think Tony stark personally welcoming you to an Iron Man
| video game :)
|
| Would you rather be told the content is generated before or
| after you see the video?
| verdverm wrote:
| Absolutely before, I expect deep fakes like this to be
| regulated as such
| northfoxz wrote:
| Facial expressions are still a bit off
| hassaanr wrote:
| In our experience as long as the content is solid small
| imperfections aren't an issue. We HN crowd are also more
| inquisitive and critical :)
| abhishekbasu wrote:
| On a side note, if the facial expressions were spot on, how
| would you as a prospective customer feel if you were later
| informed that the video was in fact AI-generated?
| hassaanr wrote:
| This is a great question that we're curious about- how would
| you feel? Would you rather know up front, later or not at
| all?
| Tammylopectin wrote:
| Interesting discussion re: the ethics of everything. From my
| perspective, if a company is using this to reach more people and
| get them to listen, at the end of the day, the onus is on the
| company for having a valuable product for the customer, and the
| methodology of getting there is less important. I actually am
| thinking of it from the perspective of the sales person or
| recruiter... saving them time, so they can work on their own
| personal goals.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Agreed! The way we see it this is a tool to build a more
| efficient workflow just like mailmerge was when it was new-
| Sales/marketing is difficult and is getting more and more
| difficult by the day. SDRs will spend 12 hours recording 200
| lead videos a week- Tavus can give that time back so they focus
| on what's important to them.
|
| Sales is a key part of every single company. Sometimes it can
| be seem unsavory when we see the reality of how it works.
| [deleted]
| xmly wrote:
| Programmable, aka A/B testable, video Ads is definitely a trend.
| But not sure whether statically generated videos are good for
| outreaching.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I think this feels very manipulative. I don't really buy that the
| authors have general ambitions and aren't just interested in
| making bank in sales, because that's exactly what they say
| they're going to do in the video. I see a couple notes about
| video game characters talking to you directly... This tech is not
| the reason that problem is difficult but whatever.
|
| The thing the urks me about this is not so much the ML, but...
| who actually wants personalized video ads? I think it is very
| uncomfortable for people you don't know to say your name like
| they know a lot about you. This would be be awful to me even it
| were paid actors, costs be damned. This gives the privacy problem
| a human face and, imo, makes it much more discomforting. What
| kind of marketing context makes it feel appropriate to send a
| personalized video message that will be warmly received but also
| cost prohibitive to actually make one?
|
| Not familiar with Loom or Vidyard, but really this whole premise
| seems really creepy, neural nets or otherwise. It smells like the
| the ads that proclaim HOT SINGLES WANT TO CHAT TO BOYS IN {your
| age range} in {your town}.
| kyletns wrote:
| I have received video pitches like this, as cold emails in my
| inbox, from people I don't know, with a thumbnail to a video
| that I just had to click to see wtf was going on. The guy in
| the video said my name and where I work while giving his pitch
| for some random product irrelevant to my life or my work.
|
| It was completely unnerving and creepy af.
|
| The fact that this startup wants to automate this creepy
| invasive behavior tells me that the founders need to do some
| serious soul-searching about why they want to create the world
| they're working to create.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Totally understand your viewpoint. The reality is though that
| sales is really just one use case and definitely not my (our)
| favorite. Our focus is more on product experiences and that's
| where most of our efforts are going towards now.
|
| The video doesn't have to be personalized to your name or
| contextual information about you specifically, although that is
| the most exciting prospect for most people. It could be a topic
| you're interested in being visualized.
|
| We're working with an e-learning company for example to help
| instructors create their courses more easily in their own
| voice. To me that's a more exciting use case. If you're
| interested to learn more about how our roadmap is focusing on
| use cases such as this feel free to reach out.
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Are you restricting what content can be created?
| hassaanr wrote:
| Our playground will let you put whatever you'd like..
|
| However we are approving every use case manually to make sure
| it's not crazy.
| pierre wrote:
| You are leaking all the generated video thanks to consecutive
| ids. However it allowed me to browse through what was generated
| and it make for a stronger sales pitch / give a better idea of
| how this can be used. The internet marketing for law firm video
| pitch work well, and if you could customise the content of the
| video (like dashboard url) they will be even more powerful.
|
| What is less clear from your website, is are you just handling
| the generation of the video, or their distribution also? Is there
| any integration with ad platform? Could I just send you an excel
| spreadsheet with video variable and a target email in the column?
| bradhe wrote:
| https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2329
|
| will be interesting to see who writes them a check :)
| hassaanr wrote:
| Shhhhh :')
| hassaanr wrote:
| We'll be moving to unique IDs this week, good catch :)
|
| The background content is customizable and dynamic per video,
| you can pass in a different URL for each video.
|
| Currently we are only handling the generation of the video- not
| distribution just yet.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Probably the kind of thing you should do before posting a
| launch HN
| derpfake wrote:
| I hate fake personalised content, whether it's text or video is
| immaterial. The same is true of many of the people I work with...
| that said, these sort of products mostly stay within the sales
| world where gaming people is entirely acceptable and arguably
| encouraged. Therefore, while I hate this and I'm sure many others
| here will too, I recognise its genius and expect to see it become
| very successful because the execution is great. Good luck (but
| stay away from my inbox!)
| hassaanr wrote:
| It can be scary to see the gears of the machine. Sales is tough
| though and if this saves an SDR from spending hours making
| videos we think it's beneficial. Video messaging is becoming
| the norm- this is just the next evolution.
|
| There are also so many cool use cases beyond sales!!
| cinbun8 wrote:
| I don't know. I was able to tell she was a robot 5 seconds in.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Haha I think you'd be surprised if you heard her in reality,
| she sounds pretty much exactly like that but I'll let her know
| she sounds like a robot :)
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| I believe this just great. Many people are talking about
| manipulation, but that is just if you intend to use it to deceive
| people.
|
| How about if you wanted to teach a subject and your students
| wanted to see your face. Perhaps you could use this to just
| upload a bunch written lessons and this would help everyone.
|
| Or how about using this for tv news/documentaries.
|
| I cannot speak for Tavus, but this is awesome tech if used
| properly.
|
| Great Job!
| thoughtstheseus wrote:
| Who owns the content produced? You should sell this to people not
| companies.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Great question! The person who is being used to make the
| recordings has full rights to their avatar model. Anything
| generated is in their control.
| mcbuilder wrote:
| I wonder if there would be as much pushback if this wasn't sales.
| Let's say it was an online course, where the AI ingests Wikipedia
| articles and renders a "professor" to lead a video on the
| subject. Would people feel lied to if they found out that
| Professor McSmartyPants wasn't real even though they never would
| have read the article without a video existing?
| hassaanr wrote:
| And that's the real goal! Building more awesome product
| experiences. We're working with e-learning companies,
| telehealth and other industries where it just isn't scalable to
| provide a personal touch that engages the end user.
|
| Starting a new game of the Witcher? Instead of personalized
| text the cut scene is Geralt talking to you directly :)
|
| With sales though it can be hard to see how the chicken nuggets
| are made.
| qfav95 wrote:
| I know we're discussing some important topics on HN today, but
| wanted to drop our favorite video request we have received on our
| playground _so far_ from Launch HN:
| https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2518
|
| Whenever it starts with "Hey Josh So I found out that the
| playgound does not seem to limit what you can type in the boxes",
| you know it'll be a good one :)
| hassaanr wrote:
| INB4 the roasts- we do limit what you can submit based on your
| template and preferences :)
| nmca wrote:
| This idea features in Greg Egan's novel "Distress" as one of the
| dystopian elements.
|
| It's a great novel; but this idea is pretty horrifying.
| hassaanr wrote:
| I'll have to give that one a read!
|
| For sales and marketing I definitely see HN crowd cringing a
| bit. However there are a lot of applications beyond such as
| onboarding, coaching, e-learning where we can build a sense of
| connection that otherwise wasn't possible.
| pclark wrote:
| It's amazing how well prospects respond to receiving a personal
| video -- but time and time again senders complain about the
| production cost -- Tavus solves this! Fascinating product and not
| terribly surprised HN seems unimpressed about this sort of thing
| ;)
| hassaanr wrote:
| HN is definitely more inquisitive and critical about things
| like these but the discussion is actually really helpful for
| us! Appreciate the thought!
| ryanSrich wrote:
| I knew the video marketing thing was taking off when 90% of the
| spam messages I get in LinkedIn started with "Hey Ryan, I know
| now might not be a great time to chat, so I created a video
| walkthrough..."
|
| How does this work? Like, it's literally just the same spam,
| but with a video. Do people really find this to be more useful
| ? What makes someone click on a video when they wouldn't have
| read your email, or clicked a link? To me, it's all the same
| low quality cold outreach.
| muratsu wrote:
| It seems like a clone of sendpotion (https://www.sendpotion.com).
| What's novel about Tavus?
| ryanianian wrote:
| This is about as manipulative as it gets. What's the angle other
| than "haha we tricked you into thinking we were actually
| personally invested in this pitch"?
|
| Right in your description you say:
|
| > [People] want to see you, see that you are real, they want to
| hear your voice.
|
| Yet that's exactly what this product takes away.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Totally understand this perspective. The end goal is to provide
| more immersive product experiences beyond just sales. Use cases
| that wouldn't be able to have a personal touch at all because
| of the scalability issue of making individual videos.
|
| Sales unfortunately does have unsavory aspects to it that we at
| HN especially dislike
| cma wrote:
| Are maketing fliers allowed to use fonts that look scuffy--like
| from an old typesetting machine--even if they were put together
| on a computer?
|
| Maketing materials are always in an arms race, a new graphic
| design trend comes out that takes a lot of work and becomes a
| quality/investment signal, then people figure out how to
| automate it and it suddenly looks passe.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Totally agree. The thought is that this is the next evolution
| of mailmerge. A different way to consume the same content!
| burkaman wrote:
| I've been tricked in the past by a very convincing
| "personalized" recruiting email that I later realized was auto-
| generated. It gave me an incredibly negative impression of the
| company and the product, and I've told the story to a lot of
| people and never met anyone that likes the idea.
|
| So the only way for this company to succeed is if their videos
| are so good that the targets never realize they're fake. I'm no
| entrepreneur, but it doesn't seem ideal if your business model
| is literally based on lies.
|
| Not to mention, if the technology is that good, then it will be
| trivial to abuse this for corporate espionage, phishing,
| blackmail, slander, etc. Sure, if they don't do it, someone
| else will, but that's never been a valid excuse.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Oof sorry to hear you had that experience. Not everyone wants
| generated content and that totally makes sense.
|
| To us this is the next evolution to something like MailChimp
| or as another commenter mentioned- handwriting style fonts in
| marketing material.
|
| As for abuse- we are heavily focused on making sure our
| platform is not abused. There are multiple checks in place to
| make sure only you can generate videos with your voice/face.
| burkaman wrote:
| I mean, fake realistic handwriting fonts are universally
| hated, otherwise you'd see people using them for wedding
| thank you notes or other legitimate purposes. I've only
| seen them used in extended car warranty scams and similar.
|
| And I'm sure you've thought about the abuse potential and
| you're doing what you can, but what's going to happen when
| accounts get hacked? Companies already have to train their
| employees to be wary of emails impersonating their CEO
| ("please wire me $10,000 immediately for a high profile
| account"), and it's going to be much harder to train
| everyone to mistrust video or even live video calls if
| Tavus works quickly. I guess it's inevitable, but again,
| you don't have to be the ones to bring that future to life.
| hassaanr wrote:
| These are all good points. Do you see use cases that
| you'd personally find useful?
|
| For example we're working with a telehealth company to
| provide weekly/monthly health updates that they otherwise
| would send through emails and people would ignore.
|
| I'm personally more interested in these product use cases
| than sales/marketing. This is also why we require set
| templates that limit what you can change.
|
| We are also working on the flip side of this problem. In
| addition to building this platform Tavus is also building
| detection tools as we continue to explore what disclosure
| should be required on these videos. I know in that sense
| we're both fire fighters and seem like we're arsonist.
| However we're really focused on providing a tool that
| builds immersive experiences while also fighting bad
| actors from other platforms that precede us/will come
| after us.
| burkaman wrote:
| Nothing I'd personally find useful, but that's not the
| issue, I understand not every product is for me.
|
| Maybe it would help if you included testimonials from
| people consuming the videos, rather than just producers.
| At the moment I genuinely can't imagine anyone feeling
| anything but misled and disappointed upon discovering
| their "personalized" message was actually auto-generated,
| but if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. If you have feedback from
| viewers of your videos (not just sales people seeing
| demos, actual end recipients) that understand how they
| were made and still like them, I think that would help
| demonstrate some positive value.
|
| Edit: Maybe language learning? I wonder if hearing myself
| speaking a new language would help me learn it.
| hassaanr wrote:
| This is a fantastic suggestion. Providing the end
| consumer perspective is definitely something we can do-
| we'll work on adding that to our website.
|
| Language learning is a super cool use case! We're working
| on other languages atm
| henning wrote:
| This is spam. The audio sounds like it was processed through a
| vocoder.
| hassaanr wrote:
| You should hear her in real life! We have a link to the
| original video in the playground- you'll notice it's pretty
| much the same.
| fire wrote:
| This could be fantastic for customized customer responses and
| video help content in a CX context
| hassaanr wrote:
| Absolutely! CX and onboarding are one of the key use cases we
| see a lot of success in.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| Uncanny valley is an issue here, the video is unsettling to me.
| How have people responded?
| hassaanr wrote:
| Take a look at the original that's linked in the playground-
| she was pretty uncanny naturally haha. TBH we notice because
| we're looking for it specifically- 99% of people our videos
| have gone out to have not noticed until someone has disclosed
| to them.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| This is very cool. I can get a lot of the skepticism here and
| almost certainly this technology can end up with unsavory results
| if abused.
|
| So perhaps that's my question -- how are you thinking about anti-
| fraud and anti-abuse at a high level? There's no HIPAA or CCPA
| for deepfakes yet, but one imagines that's only a matter of time.
| How are you planning to address this? Do you have any interest in
| having a hand working with lawmakers to develop this legislation
| to ensure responsible usage?
| hassaanr wrote:
| Absolutely! We're continuously researching and learning about
| how we can make technology such as ours safer.
|
| Currently our platform has a number of mechanisms to prevent
| abuse. We require explicit voice disclosure to perform any
| training on a voice/avatar as well as ensure ownership of a
| voice/avatar and resulting content is in the hands of the
| individual, not a company. This is in addition to limits put on
| how you can utilize our platform and what templates you can
| make.
|
| We totally expect there to be regulation for technology like
| this and we'd love to work with legislators to enforce
| responsible usage.
|
| We're working on the flip side of this technology as well-
| we're developing tools to detect generated video content in
| order to promote safer usage in the future.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Didn't see any mentions of other languages on the website. Does
| Tavus support anything else other than English? If not, are there
| any plans to roll them out? Thanks.
| hassaanr wrote:
| Great question! At the moment we only support English, but are
| working on other languages to support as well. Any language in
| particular you're looking for?
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| This is really interesting. I think people find personal videos
| more engaging because they /know/ they aren't spam. If this
| technology becomes mainstream, I imagine that people will start
| to think about these types of videos in the same way.
| [deleted]
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