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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

#21

Post by hobofan »

mikewarot wrote: post #13

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/…

> Are there any really good open source speech to text programs?

I've looked into the field this year (exploring to build a product in a similar niche to Descript), but everything I've encountered and tested is severly lacking (including Descript).

There are no good text(!) speech recognition programs in general. This is in contrast to sentence speech recognition which is decent.

Once you go beyond a single sentence you encounter a lot more problems which are generally under-researched (or at the minimum under-productivized), like sentence boundary detection, punctuation, etc..

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

#23

Post by ramraj07 »

bassman9000 wrote: post #11

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 you…

There's a difference between Googles consumer facing products where all these services are availed for free vs. enterprise clients using gcp - it'll be very surprising at the least if they don't honor these terms with their clous speech to text offerings.

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

#24

Post by xabotage »

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.

This. I've never seen hners describe a product as "sexy" as many times as in the comments here.

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

#26

Post by londons_explore »

ramraj07 wrote: post #23
bassman9000 wrote: post #11

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 you…

There's a difference between Googles consumer facing products where all these services are availed for free vs. enterprise clients using gcp - it'll be very surprising at the least if they don't honor these terms with their clous speech to text offerings.

Google cloud speech to text has 2 prices. You pay extra if you won't allow them to keep the data to improve the product. It adds ~50% to the price.

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

#27

Post by ffpip »

xabotage wrote: post #24
ced wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the HN comments here are suspicious as well.

This. I've never seen hners describe a product as "sexy" as many times as in the comments here.

> I've never seen hners describe a product as "sexy" as many times as in the comments here.

There are just 2 comments with the word 'sexy'. 4, if including your comment and mine.

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

#28

Post by jamessb »

Maneesh Agrawala [1] and his group has done lots of similar work with the same basic idea of editing audio or narrated video as if it's text:

* Content-Based Tools for Editing Audio Stories [2] (the software is released as an open-source project called speecheditor [3])

* Text-Based Editing of Talking-head video [4]

* QuickCut: An Interactive Tool for Editing Narrated Video [5]

[1]: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/

[2]: http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/audiostories/

[3]: https://ucbvislab.github.io/speecheditor/

[4]: https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/

[5]: https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/quickcut/

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

#29

Post by tgirod »

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 wonder if deep learning algorithms such as worldsheet [0] would help in simulating multiple angles, so the program can switch from one angle to another on cuts, to make them less jarring ...

[0] https://worldsheet.github.io/

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