People like podcasts, because they are interesting stories told by humans. Good podcasts have a lot of creativity behind them. Your HN Recap podcast uses a bland voice that sometimes struggles with tech terms, and the auto-generated summaries often feature deep details and miss the intention of the story. Auto-generated content on YouTube is usually misleading spam, how will you prevent your auto-generated podcasts from flooding podcast aggregators with such content?
Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
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Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#52How will you prevent your service from being used to flood the world with worthless algorithmically generated slop?
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#53Seems cool! One thing I noticed listening to one of the PG essays was that it changed voices for one of the pull quotes, which was a nice touch!
Might be cool to have a feature that read out the source too, like someone would if a human was reading a quote from a book. Hard to control for everyone's different annotation style though I'd imagine.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#54Seems cool! One thing I noticed listening to one of the PG essays was that it changed voices for one of the pull quotes, which was a nice touch! Might be cool to have a feature that read out the source too, like someone would if a human was reading a quote from a book. Hard to control for everyone's different annotation style though I'd imagine.
Yeah hard to automate, but that’s why we built the UI to give the controls to everyone to make it as elaborate and high quality they want.
Thanks for kind words!
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#55Podshorty does something kind of similar, but it takes any YouTube link, summarizes it and generates a podcast using the voices of the original speakers. Also creates transcripts so you can follow along. https://www.podshorty.com
This is copyright infringement, not ok to be using and monetising off of someone else’s voice. Over the next months there are plans for way tighter controls on this so I’d expect that the “using the voices of the original speakers” feature will not be available, unless a monetisation method is developed.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#56Podshorty does something kind of similar, but it takes any YouTube link, summarizes it and generates a podcast using the voices of the original speakers. Also creates transcripts so you can follow along. https://www.podshorty.com
The barriers to entry are so low (for now), and everyone is scrambling to build a moat. The AI image generation space has hundreds of players. Audio has dozens. One likely outcome is that big tech will come to each of the "successful" companies with close peer competitors and offer to buy them. If they say no, they buy their competitor. Or build it internally. You'll have to run really fast and hard to survive. I thi…
Thank you!
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#57This is a welcome tool indeed. Question: how would you describe how you're different to Descript?
Descript is an excellent "podcast editing" tool, but is not a "podcast creation" / text-to-speech first platform. It offers "Overdub", but they suggest limited use of it (replacing 1-2 words), not full podcast creation. The quality of the text-to-speech model they use is not at the same level as the ElevenLabs model we are using, so I think someone would struggle to create an engaging podcast using Overdub. I'd also…
Thanks, makes sense! Have you thought about targeting Substack-based podcasts also? Given how substack podcasters likely wouldn't need the publishing part.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#58I wish there was more in this space geared toward audiobooks. There are so many brilliant novels in my collection that never got an audiobook release and it'd be amazing to be able to generate my own.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#59Translating a podcast into so many languages with two clicks increases our reach so much. Great stuff Wondercraft, keep it up
Ha, look into this "person's" account. Created a few months ago and has ONLY responded to Wondercraft. What a sleazy practice, but I guess we should expect a total lack of integrity from such a product. What fun times we live in!
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#60Great, more robot voices. No thanks. The point of a podcast is the human part. I can just have gpt blather to me thru tts if i wanted fake podcasts. I regret saying this, but your tech will actively make the world worse.