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Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

descript.com

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Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#11

Post by bassman9000 »

https://www.descript.com/security

We don't use your Project Information for anything other than providing the service we offer — e.g. we don’t sell it; we don’t use it for marketing; we don’t use it for advertising.

This is a strong statement, which is nice. Only covers the projects themselves, though.

Under what's shared:

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to provide automatic transcription

Google only accesses or uses your data to complete the automatic transcription service. Shortly after completing the service, Google deletes your data from its servers.

As the only HIPAA-compliant automatic transcription service, Google is an extremely privacy-friendly transcription service.

3 second search:

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/22/tech/google-street-view-p...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-privacy-l...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/06/23/google-c...

And then there's a bunch of other integrations with Google/AWS/others.

I understand some of the issues were fixed bugs, but I don't know if selling Google integration as a privacy choice is honest, given Google's business model.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#13

Post by mikewarot »

This is amazing, I wonder how I can do this offline, using open source tools.

Are there any really good open source speech to text programs? I imagine it's going to involve a pre-trained neural net.

[update] Following a thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20097542

It looks like I might be able to do this (speech recognition) in less than real time (because I don't have a GPU) using https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#15

Post by ced »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #4

The user quotes sound almost too good to be true. When I think of the average YouTuber discussing video editing software, the words "best productization of machine learning I've ever seen" do not come to mind.

Some of the HN comments here are suspicious as well.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#16

Post by ZephyrBlu »

ced wrote: post #15
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #4

The user quotes sound almost too good to be true. When I think of the average YouTuber discussing video editing software, the words "best productization of machine learning I've ever seen" do not come to mind.

Some of the HN comments here are suspicious as well.

I disagree. The product is just that cool, that's why there are so many positive comments.

The website and product look sexy, the promo video isn't cringe and their "overdub" functionality looks like black magic.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#18

Post by jchw »

trestenhortz wrote: post #17

It looks like there’s cool stuff in there but I’m not sure what. I don’t think this does a great job of selling itself.

Have you watched the video? I disagree, it seems to sell itself pretty good. The promotional video isn't very long and it's pretty well cut (which is a good sign, for what they're trying to sell.) And it shows plenty of interesting features too, like overdub.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#19

Post by nimbix »

onion2k wrote: post #9

This looks amazing for audio. There's no doubt that this will massively improve podcasts, radio, etc. I can't imagine watching a video that's been chopped up like that would be a particularly nice experience though. Editing video to remove unwanted sections and not have it look like people's heads are jumping around weirdly is really hard. Cuts are really noticeable. If they've managed to fix that with ML it's going…

I watched a youtuber go through the whole flow of producing a video using Descript and it doesn't do anything in terms of real video editing. It's useful for removing bad takes out of a longer video, but then you need to export the chopped up product and spend a lot of additional time fixing it up and makeing it flow seamlessly in a tool like AfterEffects or DavinciResolve.

Re: Descript – A collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc

#20

Post by Yenrabbit »

The download page doesn't show anything particularly helpful if you're on an unsupported platform (eg Linux). From the source:

window.onload = function detectOS(){

   if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Mac")!=-1) window.location.replace("/download/mac");

   if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Win")!=-1) window.location.replace("/download/windows");

   if (screen.width
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