From a technology point of view, this is really cool. From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice way to say... I hate it. Or more specifically, I hate that it generates the voice, and basically enables video content spam. What we don't need more of is cheap, easy to automatically generate videos that are basically spam and/or clickbait, trying to get views.…
> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument. As someone that is building a tool in the roughly same space (machine voiced video generation), I can j…
> If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument.
The problem is getting to the end -- I don't want to spend several minutes trying to decide if it's spam or useful. It's simply easier and safer for me to use "contains auto-generated voice" as a filter to avoid watching garbage. Specifically I'm talking about videos like the ones discussed in this video [1].
Though I'd generally agree that good quality content is good quality content, I personally think there's something lost by using a machine-generated voice. Good human narrators add nuance and emphasis and energy, and it's much more interesting when someone is passionate or excited about the topic they're talking about and you can hear that come through.
Some humans are bad narrators, of course, and the machine-generated voice may not be worse by comparison. The problem is I'd just rather not listen to an emotionless voice -- whether it's machine-generated or human -- read a script, I'd rather just read it myself.
Maybe I'm wrong and the generated voices are much better than I've heard (any examples?) but I think part of the problem remains in that unless I'm forced to watch (eg, internal training) or have a recommendation come from someone I trust, it's still safer to filter out videos with machine-generated voice as "probably spam/garbage".
> it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again
I think this is a very compelling feature, but as a potential consumer of these videos (either accidentally on youtube or forced via internal training) I wish someone would come up with a way to enable this without having to resort to using the emotionless robot voice.
This again could just be my personal preference: I think emotionless robot voice is pretty much going to always mean somewhere between low- and mediocre-quality video, and I also think a low quality video is significantly worse than just having an easily-updatable HTML/PDF/whatever document with pictures/screenshots/diagrams as appropriate.