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Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

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Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#31

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

thih9 wrote: post #27

I played the example video ("how to change language in Slack"). I liked the result as a video, but I kept thinking that I'd like it even more as a regular article. If the input is photo and text then I think I'd prefer to consume it by just looking at photos and text. What's the value of generating a video out of them? For context, I do watch how to videos too, but I do that for actions that are harder to describe wi…

Yep, if I'm trying to find out how to do something I can do right now then I'd rather have an article. Otherwise I'd be pausing and rewinding a video multiple times.

If I'm just generally interested and it's not easy for me to do at that moment, then I'd rather have a video.

Since it's all generated I reckon an article and accompanying video would be a good product.

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#33

Post by theden »

pbprabhuram wrote: post #3

We are eager to announce to the HN community the public release of "WowTo" - software for creating How-To videos. Pain point: Creating How-To videos which can be tutorials, guides, step-by-step walkthroughs or video slideshows are difficult to create with current video editors in the market. Because they target a wide base so either they lack certain much needed features for creating How-tos or becomes complex to edi…

Is there a demo of all the different types of voices (without needing to sign up)? The ones in the demos are too robotic for my use-case

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#34

Post by imafish »

Fine idea, but I believe the better issue to tackle here is:

- how do I easily create and display how-to guides?

Maybe it's just me, but how-to videos are not as easily consumable as a simple step-by-step guide on a single page. All tools, I've tried for creating the latter, suck. Any ideas for that? :)

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#35

Post by CraigJPerry »

imafish wrote: post #34

Fine idea, but I believe the better issue to tackle here is: - how do I easily create and display how-to guides? Maybe it's just me, but how-to videos are not as easily consumable as a simple step-by-step guide on a single page. All tools, I've tried for creating the latter, suck. Any ideas for that? :)

Reveal.js is low overhead for this use case - create a stack of vertical slides (overhead is typically just an opening and closing html tag for each section of your guide) and use the javascript api to toggle overview mode on when the page loads (1 line overhead plus open and closing script tags).

I know you should typically use reveal for presentations but the overview mode and print to pdf feature are pretty usable for guides.

I like it primarily for the low overhead, but it has decent support for low-lighting irrelevant lines when presenting code (my typical use case) and i can use markdown for text and because it’s pure text in git, i find it easy to share with others when there’s collaboration needed.

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#37

Post by alexb_ »

This sounds like it would absolutely ruin the internet as a resource for how-to videos. When anyone can use massive amounts of data scraping and underpaid labor to make extremely low quality videos and spam youtube with them, actually half decent how-to videos will get completely lost. Not to mention, you can just put something completely wrong on without making it immediately obvious.

Imagine Roel Van de Paar[1] except anyone can easily do it and the quality isn't so bad that it gets lost in the algorithm.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/roelvandepaar

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#38

Post by techdragon »

imafish wrote: post #34

Fine idea, but I believe the better issue to tackle here is: - how do I easily create and display how-to guides? Maybe it's just me, but how-to videos are not as easily consumable as a simple step-by-step guide on a single page. All tools, I've tried for creating the latter, suck. Any ideas for that? :)

Oh but it’s not a fine idea. It’s expanding the scope of our problems. I have ADHD … how to videos are fucking poison.

I first noticed it with minecraft redstone machine explanations and tutorials. They started out as nice elaborate step by step guides with pictures… then they became videos full of calls to action from Patreon and twitch.tv and discord and their various minecraft servers…

Now I see it fucking everywhere and I’m sick of it. I want you to walk me through a process so I can follow it at my own speed. I don’t want your artificially slowed down video recipe with 6 minutes of filler life story shit to help you get that second YouTube advert or your sped up and fast cut edited tick-tock reposted to YouTube with on screeen clickable call to action pop ups kindly enabled by YouTube in their latest “crack cocaine for users attention” update and most fucking important of all… I do not want someone making it easier to produce this sort of shit for technical content that is hard enough to understand as it is from probably already average-to-poor quality documentation without getting a shitty AI powered video recap!

I hate having to say this but as much as I feel like an old fart on the lawn yelling at children to get off it… something something eternal September something something… it legitimately needs saying. Video is not universally the best way to share information and the fact that YouTube, et. al. will host your video content for free so you don’t have to try and work out how to make a web page, so you can focus on building your brand or whatever motivates the content in the first place … does not make it appropriate that we are sliding gradually into an idiocracy style world where nothing ever gets ducking written down properly.

And it just you know… makes my life harder and it’s very hard to be sympathetic to people making my life harder as their business model.

Edit: In case anyone thinks I’m being hyperbolic. I have bought at least dozen physical items in the last year where the only written instructions were legally mandatory safety info and how to plug it in. Everything else was QR code to their YouTube clip or companies YouTube channel…

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#39

Post by layer8 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #6

Quick change to the text on /pdf-to-video "Do you often find yourself explaining about the documents to your clients or team? Now, let the AI do this for you with WowTo." This doesn't sound native. I would change it to "Do you often find yourself explaining documents to your clients or team? Now, let the WowTo AI do the explaining for you."

If only they had an AI capable of creating good translations.

Re: Show HN: Easily create How-to videos with AI

#40

Post by mkl »

alexb_ wrote: post #37

This sounds like it would absolutely ruin the internet as a resource for how-to videos. When anyone can use massive amounts of data scraping and underpaid labor to make extremely low quality videos and spam youtube with them, actually half decent how-to videos will get completely lost. Not to mention, you can just put something completely wrong on without making it immediately obvious. Imagine Roel Van de Paar[1] exc…

There are tons of low-effort text-to-speech how-to videos on YouTube already, so I think that's a battle already being lost.
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