[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) - Use text-to-speech...
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Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) - Use text-to-speech to create
podcasts easily
Hi HN! We're Dimitris and Youssef, founders of Wondercraft
(https://www.wondercraft.ai/), a platform that leverages AI voices
to make podcast creation simple. This video shows how it works:
https://www.loom.com/share/fa8ac8eba8b9440dbe0321ccb8ba9426?....
"Hacker News Recap" (https://www.wondercraft.ai/podcasts/hacker-
news-recap) a podcast produced using our platform, has been running
for 4 months and currently gets close to 23k listens per month.
We've made its analytics publicly available:
https://op3.dev/show/f77aea62-97e5-5cce-92c6-9464e51c30c6. Having
previously attempted to start a podcast, we were well aware of the
difficulties. Figuring out what equipment and software you need to
buy is a daunting start. Editing is a lengthy and tedious process,
technical difficulties often occur during recording, and planning
logistics around recording is a hassle. As a result, content
release is infrequent, which leads to lackluster growth. At the
same time, podcast consumption is experiencing exponential growth.
There are 500M podcast listeners around the world, double in size
compared to 5 years ago. Apart from the growth in listeners,
podcasts are the medium that is most likely to influence behavior,
which is the reason why the number of businesses having podcasts
has grown 5x over the past 5 years. Finally, the last piece that
led to the creation of Wondercraft is that text-to-speech models
saw a big improvement about 6 months ago, with ElevenLabs releasing
models with an output that is almost indistinguishable to humans
(see HN thread here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34361651). Wondercraft
integrates realistic text-to-speech with an infrastructure that
simplifies podcast creation. For example, you can integrate music,
publish your podcast / create an RSS feed, generate a video for
your episode, get assistance in the script generation, auto
generate show notes and transcript and translate your podcast all
together. All text based tasks (e.g. script assistance, show note
generation, etc) are completed using a chain of custom prompts to
LLM models. All text-to-speech is done through custom voices that
are either synthetically generated or professionally cloned from
Voice Actors, using the ElevenLabs platform. Tasks such as episode
translation involve the use of both LLMs and ElevenLabs. Video
generation runs using Remotion and the RSS feed is an XML creation
and updating routine. Since launching, we've had more than 13k
users sign up to create their podcast. Use cases that we're seeing
include: businesses repurposing their blogs and generating video
content for their socials; writers/bloggers/newsletters reaching
audience through another medium; news outlets and publications
adding a news rundown podcast in their lineup; businesses creating
internal educational/cultural material; and podcast studios using
Wondercraft to serve client needs faster. Wondercraft is not a
tool for fully AI generated content. Rather, we save people time by
transferring content they've created (e.g. an article they've
written) to another medium. This technology is best suited for news
rundowns and narrational format podcasts (often used by businesses
talking about a niche topic). And while interview and
conversational formats will sound better person-to-person, the
logistical and (often) sound quality issues remain, so we're
testing out an "Async Podcasts" feature, where an interviewee can
respond to questions async in writing, share a photo and
(optionally) a clip of their voice, and a podcast will be created
out of it. We'd love to hear any thoughts, comments or experiences
you may have had in relation to leveraging text to speech for
podcast creation. Thank you for taking the time to read!
Author : diminikolaou
Score : 136 points
Date : 2023-08-11 12:46 UTC (1 days ago)
| causi wrote:
| I wish there was more in this space geared toward audiobooks.
| There are so many brilliant novels in my collection that never
| got an audiobook release and it'd be amazing to be able to
| generate my own.
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| I am a regular listener of the podcast "Hacker News Recap"
| (linked in the post description) and I always doubt if that's a
| real human reading the script. It is not a simple text-to-speech
| thing. Instead, it feels like a real human talking, with real
| emotion in it. I am already in love with Anna, the voice behind
| the HN Recap podcast!
|
| Also I played around with their podcast generation tool, where it
| neatly built a podcast from my blog posts. This is a good example
| of what Generative AI can do in the media domain. Congrats on the
| production launch! Keep up!
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thanks for listening @vishnuharidas! Any feedback always
| welcome and if you want more languages let us know which ones.
| another-dave wrote:
| Seems cool! One thing I noticed listening to one of the PG essays
| was that it changed voices for one of the pull quotes, which was
| a nice touch!
|
| Might be cool to have a feature that read out the source too,
| like someone would if a human was reading a quote from a book.
| Hard to control for everyone's different annotation style though
| I'd imagine.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yeah hard to automate, but that's why we built the UI to give
| the controls to everyone to make it as elaborate and high
| quality they want.
|
| Thanks for kind words!
| swyx wrote:
| congrats on launching! i've been a vocal fan for a little bit:
| https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1661848597728575489
|
| however when i tried signing up for your pod to make my own, i
| was disappointed that it would only take manually entered
| content. i want to hook it up to my twitter or rss or discord
| feed, and have you Do The Thing. please!
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Dming you on twitter, to find "The Thing"
| sakopov wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Looks like ElevenLabs is your direct
| competitor. How do you plan to differentiate? So far their
| pricing is a little better and they also provide the ability to
| create a custom voice model.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| 11 is not our competitor, they are our partner and model
| provider. We've built all of the podcast related infrastructure
| (publishing, show notes, video etc) on top of their text to
| speech capabilities.
| sakopov wrote:
| Sorry, I missed that in your description.
| monological wrote:
| Podshorty does something kind of similar, but it takes any
| YouTube link, summarizes it and generates a podcast using the
| voices of the original speakers. Also creates transcripts so you
| can follow along. https://www.podshorty.com
| diminikolaou wrote:
| This is copyright infringement, not ok to be using and
| monetising off of someone else's voice. Over the next months
| there are plans for way tighter controls on this so I'd expect
| that the "using the voices of the original speakers" feature
| will not be available, unless a monetisation method is
| developed.
| monological wrote:
| Actually, according to US law, it doesn't appear to be
| copyright infringement. Do you have anything to back up those
| claims?
|
| According to Butler v. Target Corp., it was held that
| although lyrics to a song are copyrightable, the underlying
| voice is not. As such, there is no copyright protection
| available to the infinite number of words or phrases a person
| might utter in their distinctive voice.
|
| Additionally, the synthesized audio can be considered
| derivative, as it transforms the the "audio" into something
| entirely different than original, and so falls under 17
| U.S.C.A SS 103.
|
| So, I'm not sure what you mean when you say there are plans
| for tighter controls. Care to back that up?
|
| Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is my personal
| opinion.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Sorry what is exactly your claim here? That it is legal to
| use and monetise off of someone else's voice? Using Morgan
| Freeman's or Joe Rogan's voice for example to host your
| podcasts?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Voices are not protected by copyright.
| monological wrote:
| I'm just pointing out that there is a lot of legal gray
| area when it comes to AI-synthesized voices and
| copyright. It still remains to be seen how the courts end
| up ruling.
|
| What's the difference between using an AI voice and Bill
| Hader or Jimmy Fallon doing a celebrity impersonation on
| his show and monetizing that?
| topato wrote:
| Yes. As long as you make no claims as to who's voice it
| is, that is.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Their website seems to be plastered in claims that it
| "uses the original speaker's voice"
| echelon wrote:
| The barriers to entry are so low (for now), and everyone is
| scrambling to build a moat.
|
| The AI image generation space has hundreds of players. Audio
| has dozens.
|
| One likely outcome is that big tech will come to each of the
| "successful" companies with close peer competitors and offer to
| buy them. If they say no, they buy their competitor. Or build
| it internally.
|
| You'll have to run really fast and hard to survive. I think
| it's totally doable, though, and this is a very interesting
| attack gradient.
|
| Best of luck! It's exciting times.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thank you!
| benzible wrote:
| Different but related idea, this creates a personal podcast feed:
| https://reca.st
| anotherpaulg wrote:
| I use Speech Central with the Azure voices for listening to web
| articles as audiobooks/podcasts. It works quite well and is
| basically free. The azure voices are excellent. The text
| extraction engine of Speech Central fails to pull all the
| content out of some webpages, which is the biggest downside to
| this solution.
|
| https://speechcentral.net/2023/04/14/harness-the-power-of-az...
| topher200 wrote:
| Also https://audioread.com/. I love that you can forward emails
| to audioread and they'll be transcribed into podcasts. Thank
| you AI-voiced Matt Levine!
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thanks for sharing those. We're currently testing out the
| release of personalised podcasts, as the combination of LLMs
| and the realistic text-to-speech can lead to a solution of a
| quality level that has not been available until now.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is a great product: I've listened to the HN podcast and it's
| great.
|
| > podcast consumption is experiencing exponential growth
|
| I find this so interesting! I know my personal podcast
| consumption has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic started. I
| pretty much only listen to podcasts when I commute, and I stopped
| commuting then. I assumed that everyone did that but I guess I
| was wrong.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yeah it's a valid point, podcast consumption is definitely
| synonymous to commute.
|
| I'd say these are some reasons for continued increase: -
| Commute has not fallen as much as we might think - More quality
| content is becoming available, bringing in more audience -
| Natural expansion from people enjoying the experience and
| sharing +++
| kyriakosel wrote:
| There are too many books that I would want to listen to and don't
| have audiobooks. i'd definitely give it a try with that in mind
| porkbeer wrote:
| Great, more robot voices. No thanks. The point of a podcast is
| the human part. I can just have gpt blather to me thru tts if i
| wanted fake podcasts. I regret saying this, but your tech will
| actively make the world worse.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Strong words, but I understand where you're coming from. I get
| your point on people liking authentic stories from people and
| that's the value of podcasts. There's many different formats of
| podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20% of overall
| podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being those
| formats are best done person to person. But for all other
| podcasts (e.g news rundowns, narrations etc), podcasts
| generated on Wondercraft on a daily basis are proving that as
| long as human creativity is there podcasts created using TTS
| and other AI tools can be very engaging and appealing for many.
|
| There is so much written content currently confined in written
| format and we have built an app that makes it very easy to
| convert it to engaging audio. Paul Graham essays is a prime
| example.
|
| If that necessarily means there is also some "fake" podcasts,
| that no one will listen to anyway, I think it's a fair
| exchange.
|
| So although I understand your position, no, we are by no means
| making the world worse.
| f5ve wrote:
| I have to say I mostly agree and I'm very surprised at how few
| negative comments there are in this thread. It's good the
| community is supportive but with the current state of AI this
| product is essentially just spewing more nonsense into the
| world. (The podcast world already has more than enough human-
| generated nonsense) More importantly, I don't foresee much of a
| demand for this.
|
| Hopefully the creators can either parlay a pseudo-success here
| and transition to something else, or, if AI drastically
| improves in the coming years, provide a more worthwhile
| service.
| RankingMember wrote:
| This is both brilliant and scary- I anticipate that the amount of
| web-scraped stuff about to land on Spotify's podcasts tab is
| going to be insane.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| We're lowering the barrier to create a podcast so that might
| happen to an extent, but on the flip side, valued written
| content that has been confined in text format can now find its
| way to audio format. Paul Graham essays is a good example:
| https://app.wondercraft.ai/p/myqXnyUD
| replwoacause wrote:
| Did PG have to approve this? Or can you do it without his
| consent?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| PG has not approved for this to be done with his own voice,
| which is why we're using a custom voice (Anna).
| replwoacause wrote:
| Cool thanks. This is impressive tech. Will give it a try
| for some personal projects.
| funthree wrote:
| 1hr and 5hr is not long enough
| lotkowskim wrote:
| You can try https://pod-genie.com which is slightly cheaper but
| I must admin the voices aren't as good.
|
| Great work Wondercraft team!
|
| Full disclosure - I built pod-genie.
| swyx wrote:
| feedback - you put up the paywall too early. let me epxlore
| the platform a bit before deciding whether or not to pay. i
| paid for the $5 plan just to explore bc i'm intensely
| interested in this space but most people would be put off bc
| your landing page does not do a good job of saying what
| exactly it is you do and how it works
| swyx wrote:
| and i just canceled bc the output isn't good, think you
| might be using gpt3.5 or something, give us a way to
| sample/tweak
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Compute to get this quality of text to speech is still quite
| expensive. Prices will drop as models become smaller. If you
| need more for now, we do offer Enterprise plans.
| cca778 wrote:
| Recently I have produced some short video lectures to distributed
| to research partners. I can write reasonably well in english, but
| my speaking is terrible. I manage to prepare fine-tuned english
| subtitles.
|
| A text-to-speech can help creating english audio tracks for those
| producing original content in other languages
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Many educators use Wondercraft right now as it also generates
| video which helps students. Check out if can be helpful to you.
| magdyks wrote:
| I've been listening and really loving the hacker news recap. Keep
| up the good work and please let me listen in different languages!
| diminikolaou wrote:
| thanks Magdy, there's 30 languages available on the app for
| anyone to create their podcast in. If there's enough interest
| for HN Recap in other languages we'll launch those!
|
| Which language would you want it in?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| People like podcasts, because they are interesting stories told
| by humans. Good podcasts have a lot of creativity behind them.
| Your HN Recap podcast uses a bland voice that sometimes struggles
| with tech terms, and the auto-generated summaries often feature
| deep details and miss the intention of the story. Auto-generated
| content on YouTube is usually misleading spam, how will you
| prevent your auto-generated podcasts from flooding podcast
| aggregators with such content?
| Kiro wrote:
| Don't tell me what I like. I don't care whether something is
| "told by humans" or not. In fact, HN Recap is the only podcast
| I listen to.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| You're not the only one
| satvikpendem wrote:
| _Some_ people like those, _some_ of the time. I too enjoy a
| good Conan or Hardcore History podcast but many other podcasts
| I listen to are basically audiobooks where, if the voice is
| good enough, I 'll listen to them. History of Rome is a prime
| example, it's essentially a very long audiobook where the
| reading voice makes nearly no difference to me.
| boxed wrote:
| The book would still be written by a human. This product
| seems like AI generated spam...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Hm, based on their site it looks like it's more of an
| editor where you type content that's then converted to
| speech, there's nothing in there that _necessitates_ that
| the content be AI generated. Seems to me more of a
| competitor to https://www.descript.com/ than anything.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yeah that's write, we highlight that the content should
| come from human creativity.
|
| Wrote some stuff here about comparison to Descript:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37089928&goto=item%
| 3Fi...
| diminikolaou wrote:
| We highlight that the creativity comes from the human. The
| text to speech is the AI Component. There is a script
| assistant that can help you adjust the tone of the text,
| but the creativity always comes from human.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The podcast you're showing as the demo of your product's
| capabilities (HN Recap) has AI-generated content. That's
| not a good choice marketing-wise.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| In relation to HN Recap, I agree that it struggles with terms,
| but I'd argue that the results show that the stories are
| captured well.
|
| I get your point on people liking authentic stories from people
| and that's the value of podcasts. There's many different
| formats of podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20%
| of overall podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being
| those formats are best done person to person. But for all other
| podcasts (e.g news rundowns, narrations etc), podcasts
| generated on Wondercraft on a daily basis are proving that as
| long as human creativity is there podcasts created using TTS
| and other AI tools can be very engaging and appealing for many.
| That is ultimately how the flooding of such content is
| regulated as well, people will only listen to content that has
| thought behind it so creators will not find much value in "auto
| generated" podcasts.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| In episode "August 10th, 2023 | Vim Boss":
|
| 1. Vim Boss - the auto-generated description fails to mention
| the post author is a top Neovim contributor. It is hard to
| tell who Bram is just from the description. It also said "the
| deceased iconic software Vim" (Vim is not dead...) The music
| feels inappropriate.
|
| 2. The Future of the Vim Project - "In an exciting movement
| towards the next stage of Vim project's evolution"? What is
| exciting about having to deal with Bram's death? Why would
| listeners care about FTP servers and websites? What does "in
| a paradoxical fusion of continuity and change" mean? A human
| would have made a segue between the two, but the robot
| couldn't.
|
| 3. MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names -
| "sailing through the sea of digital collaboration"? Why did
| it start with buzzword bingo? Why would anyone care about
| specific numbers re the Teams limitations? What are MSD-OS
| device names? (Bad pronunciation aside, a human would have
| provided some examples, considering they're mentioned in the
| article title.) The AI summary doesn't match the post title
| and what the comments focused on.
|
| 4. My Overkill Home Network - what value is there in naming
| all the random components in the author's network? That's a
| word salad that is difficult to parse and listen to.
|
| The AI butchered four out of ten stories, and it didn't do a
| great job of respecting a deceased person (it felt so happy
| about the changes in Vim). I'd rather not listen to it do
| world news.
|
| PS. your podcast needs a transcript. And the last sentence
| felt cut off.
| ilovetts wrote:
| Hello, The TTS voice is fantastic. Any plan to make it available
| to developers on iOS, Android, Windows etc? The bundled TTS
| voices aren't great on these platforms.
| [deleted]
| colesantiago wrote:
| This looks great and exciting, congrats on the launch.
|
| I am so happy that this exists, I was considering creating a
| podcast but it was too much effort involved and had to do and
| redo takes and other priorities.
|
| Will be considering using Wondercraft and others if they exist
| entirely for this now.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thanks @colesantiago - great to hear. That's what we're trying
| to solve, the effort behind creating a podcast is just too much
| right now and a lot of content remains confined in text format.
| oo0shiny wrote:
| This looks like a really cool idea. A question though: who holds
| the rights to the created audio? The user, or Wondercraft?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| The user holds all rights. Feel free to read
|
| Terms of Service: https://wondercraft-ai.notion.site/Terms-of-
| Service-fbfc043c...
|
| Privacy Policy: https://wondercraft-ai.notion.site/Privacy-
| Policy-f35636350f...
| oo0shiny wrote:
| Awesome, just the answer I was hoping for!
| rw2 wrote:
| Great product, first of all. I can really see a use for it. Are
| you afraid that this is too easy to clone?
|
| Someone with speechify: https://speechify.com/
|
| And who wants to write a spotify API write code can do this.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Making a GPT + text to speech wrapper is not complicated.
|
| Providing all other features (e.g video generation, podcast
| publishing, auto translation and many other features we've
| added that allow for higher quality pod creation) increase the
| level of complexity for reproducibility.
|
| Ultimately, we aim to keep building features that lead to
| higher quality pods, easier to build, and integration of
| ansiliary (video, translation, show notes) that will enhance
| our moat.
| danenania wrote:
| Amazing work. Listening a bit to the HN podcast, I'm
| impressed by the natural-sounding pronunciation of technical
| terms with non-obvious phonetics like 'postgres'. Have you
| had to tweak a lot of these manually to get them sounding so
| good or is your model mostly getting them right?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yeah Postgres is a great example, it comes up often in HN.
|
| We have a small map of tweaks, and our users keep feeding
| us with more. The model performs great on its own most of
| the time though.
| danenania wrote:
| Very cool. By accumulating lots of these tweaks, I feel
| like you're also going to have an opportunity to backdoor
| your way into a great text-to-speech API product as well
| if you have any interest in going that direction. It
| seems like the main challenge there is ironing out all
| the edge cases and you've created an excellent feedback
| loop for accomplishing that.
| 0921kiyo wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! The output quality is very good!
| youssefarizk wrote:
| Thanks!
| zurfer wrote:
| I love it. I am also a regular listener to "PG Essays"[1]. I
| would never have read so many of his essays as I'm listening to.
|
| [1]
| https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkyLndvbmRlcmN...
| youssefarizk wrote:
| Thanks! We're planning on adding a lot more!
| wtetzner wrote:
| No "Beating the Averages"?
|
| Also, it's too bad it doesn't use PG's voice.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| We're adding all of the essays, should be all done by end of
| August.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| It's amazing how good your service is. Not only the text to
| speech, but like even the emphasis it knows how to give on each
| word. Fantastic times, fantastic times indeed.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thank you!
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I might have missed it on the site, but is there any plan for
| multiple voices on a single podcast? And any type of annotations
| to add emotion the voice (scared, excited, angry)?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yeah you can have multiple voices on a single podcast in the
| current version.
|
| You just need to add more than one section, and then alternate
| the voice you choose to talk.
|
| Annotations for emotion are coming by the end of August.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| I personally wouldn't use this. I don't know if your point about
| information being "locked" in written form is even being
| addressed here. There are so many audio books out there but I
| personally only really enjoy audio books delivered by the author
| themselves or someone who can actually capture the nuances in the
| text. So I think you'll just end up moving this information from
| being locked in prose to being locked in sound, unless you can
| accurately capture the tone, nuances and the context around the
| whole text.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| This is pretty awesome. Are any languages other than English
| supported?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yes - this is full list. English, Spanish, Portuguese, German,
| Italian, French, Polish, Hindi, Korean,, Dutch, Turkish,
| Swedish, Russian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Ukrainian,
| Greek, Czech, Finish, Romanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Malay,
| Hungarian, Norwegian, Slovak, Croatian, Tamil
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Nice! Any plans for Japanese?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Yes, but it will take a few months. Looking like Q4.
| Kiro wrote:
| I don't see all those languages in the dropdown. Do I need a
| paid account?
| mcpackieh wrote:
| How will you prevent your service from being used to flood the
| world with worthless algorithmically generated slop?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| For the time being, realistically it's cost prohibitive for
| users to generate slop without expectation for some return, so
| that's a current natural mechanism.
|
| As the prices decrease, due to model improvement, best/worst
| practice guides, and promotion of successful use cases may act
| as an additional mechanism to prevent such cases.
|
| Realistically though, given that we're lowering the bar of
| podcast creation to effectively the level of blog creation
| there might be an increase in slop content. I think that's a
| necessary problem when you lower the barrier, but there will
| always be proper curation in the aggregator level. I think HM
| is the perfect example. Internet has made blogging so easy and
| there is so much slop. But it goes unnoticed given the
| curation.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I think you should only offer this service to people who are
| willing to first record the podcast in their own voice. Then
| your service could provide utility by replacing their voice
| to cleaning up their audio, removing speech impediments (e.g.
| _" uh uh um um um"_), translating to other languages, editing
| in music, etc. Lots of people aren't good at reading/speaking
| so this service could be very useful to them, but you should
| make them prove the content is worth their own time by making
| them record at least a rough reading of the script
| themselves.
|
| If the creator can't be bothered to read the script, it would
| be a waste of time for anybody else to listen to it.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| I actually think I disagree with your last sentence.
|
| It's not that the creator can't be bothered, but that the
| tool unlocks features that are just not feasible for a
| creator. Think of Hacker News Recap for example - a 20'
| episode has been generated every single day for the past
| 122 days. That's extremely hard for a person to do. So the
| consistency that this enables is one feature.
|
| Automatic translation and video generation are other
| features that using this method of podcast creation lead
| to. So it's not necessarily that the "creator can't be
| bothered to"... there's inherently more value in some use
| cases to create a podcast this way over the traditional
| method.
| ksajadi wrote:
| I look at it from a consumer of podcasts point of view not a
| producer. If the content is good and the voice quality is natural
| then this can only help unlock more good content, by lowering the
| barrier to entry. Can't see why that is a bad thing. Sure, there
| will always be the equivalent of content farms, but remember that
| content farms exist because of Google. Without Google traffic the
| incentive to create useless content diminishes. Podcasts are not
| like that. You might be tricked into listening to one episode of
| an AI content generated (not AI voiced) one but in all likelihood
| you won't subscribe, removing the incentive.
| snissn wrote:
| Your latest hn podcast post has a low level noise that makes it
| unlistenable to me. You should be able to use non ai tools to
| remove the background hiss/hum
| dutchbrit wrote:
| I was listening to an audiobook the other day on a commute that
| was also done with AI. The main issue I had was focus, the voice
| was very monotone to begin with, and at one point it pronounced
| "it" as "IT". I didn't finish listening... That said, the voice
| isn't that bad in the HN example.
| languagehacker wrote:
| I was half expecting this to be Wondery spinning off whatever
| they do to make all their narrators sound like robots.
| hdivider wrote:
| This is a welcome tool indeed. Question: how would you describe
| how you're different to Descript?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Descript is an excellent "podcast editing" tool, but is not a
| "podcast creation" / text-to-speech first platform.
|
| It offers "Overdub", but they suggest limited use of it
| (replacing 1-2 words), not full podcast creation. The quality
| of the text-to-speech model they use is not at the same level
| as the ElevenLabs model we are using, so I think someone would
| struggle to create an engaging podcast using Overdub. I'd also
| think that this is not a direction that Descript would be
| heading to, as they have built a successful business as a
| "podcast editing" platform and catering to "podcast creation"
| would be a significant change.
|
| In addition to this, given that we are a "podcast creation"
| platform rather a "podcast editing" platform, we have focused
| on integrating functionality that allows users to go end to end
| in creating a podcasts. Examples: publishing a podcast (RSS),
| generating a video automatically, providing a shareable podcast
| page, autotranslating the podcast to other languages and a lot
| more.
| hdivider wrote:
| Thanks, makes sense! Have you thought about targeting
| Substack-based podcasts also? Given how substack podcasters
| likely wouldn't need the publishing part.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| For substackers that don't have a podcast, only have a
| written format, this tool has given them great leverage as
| they can easily provide more value to their audience by
| giving them an audio version. There's over 100 of those on
| the platform currently.
|
| For substackers that already have a podcast, that's a
| separate question. Ultimately it depends on if they think
| that they can use the time the put in for the recording and
| editing process to some other creative process and use
| Wondercraft for generating the audio. Haven't seen that
| many existing Substack podcasts for this use case to become
| that prevalent.
| Imply8215 wrote:
| Translating a podcast into so many languages with two clicks
| increases our reach so much. Great stuff Wondercraft, keep it up
| earlachromatic wrote:
| Ha, look into this "person's" account. Created a few months ago
| and has ONLY responded to Wondercraft. What a sleazy practice,
| but I guess we should expect a total lack of integrity from
| such a product. What fun times we live in!
| sufficer wrote:
| Lmao blatant astroturfing how did the OP even get more than
| 10 votes?? Must have vote botted too to get to front page
| today
| curionymous wrote:
| They're part of YC S22, so it's fiiiine. What use is a
| platform, if you can't promote the companies you invest in.
| teabee89 wrote:
| What voice is used in the translated version? Is it somehow
| inferred from the voice in the original language? Or I just
| have to choose the voice in the target language?
| diminikolaou wrote:
| It can be any voice the user chooses, but by default it's the
| same voice as the original language - all voices speak all
| languages.
| youssefarizk wrote:
| Glad it's proving useful!
| GordonS wrote:
| Not sure if I'm just not seeing it, but I can't find any
| information on pricing, or whether there's a free tier?
|
| (there's a "start for free" button, but that could mean anything,
| and it wants me to create an account)
| julvo wrote:
| There's a pricing link at the top of the page, we should
| probably try to make this more visible:
| https://www.wondercraft.ai/pricing
| masukomi wrote:
| You have an accessibility issue involving large fonts that
| makes the pricing impossible to see. To replicate set your
| font size to 20 and minimum font size to 18. Should have the
| same effect in both FF and Chrome. Note that that's not even
| very big as far as low vision needs go.
|
| screenshot here: https://share.cleanshot.com/kmXRc3ng
|
| NOTE: using zoom "command +" is NOT the same and does not
| constitute a valid test for this.
| diminikolaou wrote:
| Thank you for flagging and sorry about this. Fixing asap,
| but please use this to access for now
| https://www.wondercraft.ai/pricing
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(page generated 2023-08-12 23:02 UTC)