Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 121 posts

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#71

Post by f5ve »

porkbeer wrote: post #60

Great, 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.

I have to say I mostly agree and I'm very surprised at how few negative comments there are in this thread. It's good the community is supportive but with the current state of AI this product is essentially just spewing more nonsense into the world. (The podcast world already has more than enough human-generated nonsense) More importantly, I don't foresee much of a demand for this.

Hopefully the creators can either parlay a pseudo-success here and transition to something else, or, if AI drastically improves in the coming years, provide a more worthwhile service.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#72

Post by diminikolaou »

teabee89 wrote: post #21
Imply8215 wrote: post #4

Translating a podcast into so many languages with two clicks increases our reach so much. Great stuff Wondercraft, keep it up

What voice is used in the translated version? Is it somehow inferred from the voice in the original language? Or I just have to choose the voice in the target language?

It can be any voice the user chooses, but by default it's the same voice as the original language - all voices speak all languages.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#73

Post by diminikolaou »

mcpackieh wrote: post #66
diminikolaou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the time being, realistically it’s cost prohibitive for users to generate slop without expectation for some return, so that’s a current natural mechanism. As the prices decrease, due to model improvement, best/worst practice guides, and promotion of successful use cases may act as an additional mechanism to prevent such cases. Realistically though, given that we’re lowering the bar of podcast creation to effectiv…

I think you should only offer this service to people who are willing to first record the podcast in their own voice. Then your service could provide utility by replacing their voice to cleaning up their audio, removing speech impediments (e.g. "uh uh um um um" ), translating to other languages, editing in music, etc. Lots of people aren't good at reading/speaking so this service could be very useful to them, but you…

I actually think I disagree with your last sentence.

It's not that the creator can't be bothered, but that the tool unlocks features that are just not feasible for a creator. Think of Hacker News Recap for example - a 20' episode has been generated every single day for the past 122 days. That's extremely hard for a person to do. So the consistency that this enables is one feature.

Automatic translation and video generation are other features that using this method of podcast creation lead to. So it's not necessarily that the "creator can't be bothered to"... there's inherently more value in some use cases to create a podcast this way over the traditional method.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#74

Post by wtetzner »

zurfer wrote: post #6

I love it. I am also a regular listener to "PG Essays"[1]. I would never have read so many of his essays as I'm listening to. [1] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkyLndvbmRlcmN...

No "Beating the Averages"?

Also, it's too bad it doesn't use PG's voice.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#75

Post by monological »

diminikolaou wrote: post #69
monological wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, according to US law, it doesn't appear to be copyright infringement. Do you have anything to back up those claims? According to Butler v. Target Corp., it was held that although lyrics to a song are copyrightable, the underlying voice is not. As such, there is no copyright protection available to the infinite number of words or phrases a person might utter in their distinctive voice. Additionally, the synth…

Sorry what is exactly your claim here? That it is legal to use and monetise off of someone else's voice? Using Morgan Freeman's or Joe Rogan's voice for example to host your podcasts?

I'm just pointing out that there is a lot of legal gray area when it comes to AI-synthesized voices and copyright. It still remains to be seen how the courts end up ruling.

What's the difference between using an AI voice and Bill Hader or Jimmy Fallon doing a celebrity impersonation on his show and monetizing that?

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#76

Post by Kwpolska »

diminikolaou wrote: post #63
Kwpolska wrote: post #51

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 f…

In relation to HN Recap, I agree that it struggles with terms, but I’d argue that the results show that the stories are captured well. I get your point on people liking authentic stories from people and that’s the value of podcasts. There’s many different formats of podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20% of overall podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being those formats are best done person to pe…

In episode “August 10th, 2023 | Vim Boss”:

1. Vim Boss - the auto-generated description fails to mention the post author is a top Neovim contributor. It is hard to tell who Bram is just from the description. It also said “the deceased iconic software Vim” (Vim is not dead…) The music feels inappropriate.

2. The Future of the Vim Project - “In an exciting movement towards the next stage of Vim project’s evolution”? What is exciting about having to deal with Bram’s death? Why would listeners care about FTP servers and websites? What does “in a paradoxical fusion of continuity and change” mean? A human would have made a segue between the two, but the robot couldn’t.

3. MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names - “sailing through the sea of digital collaboration”? Why did it start with buzzword bingo? Why would anyone care about specific numbers re the Teams limitations? What are MSD-OS device names? (Bad pronunciation aside, a human would have provided some examples, considering they’re mentioned in the article title.) The AI summary doesn’t match the post title and what the comments focused on.

4. My Overkill Home Network - what value is there in naming all the random components in the author’s network? That’s a word salad that is difficult to parse and listen to.

The AI butchered four out of ten stories, and it didn’t do a great job of respecting a deceased person (it felt so happy about the changes in Vim). I’d rather not listen to it do world news.

PS. your podcast needs a transcript. And the last sentence felt cut off.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#77

Post by replwoacause »

diminikolaou wrote: post #70
replwoacause wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did PG have to approve this? Or can you do it without his consent?

PG has not approved for this to be done with his own voice, which is why we're using a custom voice (Anna).

Cool thanks. This is impressive tech. Will give it a try for some personal projects.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#78

Post by diminikolaou »

wtetzner wrote: post #74
zurfer wrote: post #6

I love it. I am also a regular listener to "PG Essays"[1]. I would never have read so many of his essays as I'm listening to. [1] https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkyLndvbmRlcmN...

No "Beating the Averages"? Also, it's too bad it doesn't use PG's voice.

We’re adding all of the essays, should be all done by end of August.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#79

Post by aloknnikhil »

I personally wouldn’t use this. I don’t know if your point about information being “locked” in written form is even being addressed here. There are so many audio books out there but I personally only really enjoy audio books delivered by the author themselves or someone who can actually capture the nuances in the text. So I think you’ll just end up moving this information from being locked in prose to being locked in sound, unless you can accurately capture the tone, nuances and the context around the whole text.

Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

#80

Post by ksajadi »

I look at it from a consumer of podcasts point of view not a producer. If the content is good and the voice quality is natural then this can only help unlock more good content, by lowering the barrier to entry. Can't see why that is a bad thing. Sure, there will always be the equivalent of content farms, but remember that content farms exist because of Google. Without Google traffic the incentive to create useless content diminishes. Podcasts are not like that. You might be tricked into listening to one episode of an AI content generated (not AI voiced) one but in all likelihood you won't subscribe, removing the incentive.
Post reply on HN