Viewing profile — kolchinski

It's very possible to get campsites but you do need to pounce right when they open up, especially in busier times of year - https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm I and…

Hah hopefully not, if this takes off we'll be filtering for illegal/immoral use! Outbound AI calling is actually illegal although widely done :(

Hi folks, my partner and I just finished the MVP of a no-code AI phone automation tool called ThunderPhone. I'd love to get your thoughts. We've worked on a few phone AI projects r…

Hi folks, Alex Kolchinski here - I'm a YC alum (W21 with Mezli) and Stanford AI Lab alum from before that. Today I'm launching something new with my friend Alec Bell (a W23 YC alum…

Excited to be able to use this, the demo was really impressive!

Oh yeah agreed that the change in prices doesn't prove it's a scam, my thought was more along the lines of - when crypto insiders who have been talking up crypto as valuable/import…

Thanks yep got it working, really great stuff!!

Hey Ben, this looks great, but I'm getting a "Rate Limit Exceeded" error, anything to be done about that?

Hi folks, Alex here with a launch I’m hoping for some feedback on! I recently finished what started as a hackathon-style project with a friend, which has now become TranslateMyCall…

Definitely, but none of my obvious suspects from my immediate network are looking/a good fit. A post like this is both to find people I don't know who might be a good fit as well a…

Hi folks, my name’s Alex Kolchinski, and I’m looking for a cofounder to build an AI-powered B2B software company with. A bit about me: -I grew up programming and worked full-time a…

I'd love to chat as well if you've still got bandwidth — I'm at alex@kolch.in Thanks, appreciate it!

Also Azure actually! Yeah for a sentence or two the onboard OCR usually gets it right, but if you’re listening to a few pages at a time there are almost always a bunch of errors an…

Check out Speechify and NaturalReader, IIRC they’re two of the most popular apps for that use case and I remember their voices were pretty solid.

Just took a look, their lower-quality model is almost exactly the same price as Azure TTS, and the quality is similar. Thanks for the pointer.

Makes sense, one other interesting use case would be looping in translation into the middle of the pipeline so that you could scan a book in a language you don't speak and have it …

Yes this is a very valid point, on a technical level it's definitely a 2-step thing. From a product perspective I'm framing it as a "this app reads books out loud to you" but if I …

Yeah I (and my fiancée) are also Audible users — this app is mostly for cases where an audiobook or even e-book don't exist, like for older books you might get from a used bookstor…

iOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) …

All languages will be tough but adding common ones that are already supported by off-the-shelf OCR, TTS, and LLMs is definitely doable; do you have any that you're most keen on?

Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription)…

It's Azure's TTS API — I'm using four of their voices.

Good idea thanks, let me figure out how to do that.

Yes, true (for now) — which language(s) are you looking for? The APIs I'm using are mostly multilingual so it'd be doable to extend to other languages.