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Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

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101–110 of 135 posts

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#102

The last year vs this year is crazy

Agreed. We were so excited about the results last year and they are SO BAD now by comparison. Hopefully we'll say the same thing again in the couple months

Hopefully not. I'm impressed with the engineering, it is a technological achievement, but my only hope right now is that this tech plateaus pretty much immediately. I can't think of a single use-case that wouldn't be at best value-neutral, and at worst extremely harmful to the people interacting with it.

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#104
This is so awesome, well done LemonSlice team! Super interesting on the ASR->LLM->TTS pipeline, and I agree, you can make it super fast (I did something myself as a 2-hour hobby project: https://github.com/acatovic/ova). I've been following full-duplex models as well and so far couldn't get even PersonaPlex to run properly (without choppiness/latency), but have you peeps tried Sesame, e.g. https://app.sesame.com/?

I played around with your avatars and one thing that it lacks is that it's "not patient", it's rushing the user, so maybe something to try and finetune there? Great work overall!

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#105

Absolutely Do Not Want. EDIT: Tell us what characters you want to see in the comments and we can make them for you to talk to (e.g. Max Headroom) Sure, that kind of thing is great fun. But photorealistic avatars are gonna be abused to hell and back and everyone knows it. I would rather talk to a robot that looks like a robot, ie C-3PO. I would even chat with scary skeleton terminator. I do not want to talk with convi…

The dichotomy of AI haters and AI dreamers is wild.

OP, I think this is the coolest thing ever. Keep going.

Naysayers have some points, but nearly every major disruptive technology has had downsides that have been abused. (Cars can be used for armed robbery. Steak knives can be used to murder people. Computers can be used for hacking.)

The upsides of tech typically far outweigh the downsides. If a tech is all downsides, then the government just bans it. If computers were so bad, only government labs and facilities would have them.

I get the value in calling out potential dangers, but if we do this we'll wind up with the 70 years where we didn't build nuclear reactors because we were too afraid. As it turns out, the dangers are actually negligible. We spent too much time imagining what would go wrong, and the world is now worse for it.

The benefits of this are far more immense.

While the world needs people who look at the bad in things, we need far more people who dream of the good. Listen to the critiques, allow it to aid in your safety measures, but don't listen to anyone who says the tech is 100% bad and should be stopped. That's anti nuclear rhetoric, and it's just not true.

Keep going!

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#106

One thing I've learnt from movie production is actually what separates professional from amateur quality is in the audio itself. Have you thought about implementing personaplex from NVDIA or other voice models that can both talk and listen at the same time? Currently the conversation still feels too STT-LLM-TTS that I think a lot of the voice agents suffer from (Seems like only Sesame and NVDIA so far have nailed the…

This is a good point on audio. Our main priority so far has been reducing latency. In service of that, we were deep in the process of integrating Hume's two-way S2S voice model instead of ElevenLabs. But then we realized that ElevenLabs had made their STT-LLM-TTS pipeline way faster in the past month and left it at that. See our measurements here (they're super interesting): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18k…

I'm a filmmaker. While what OP said is 100% true, your instincts are right.

Not only is perfect is the enemy of good enough, you're only looking for PMF signal at this point. If you chase quality right now, you'll miss validation and growth.

The early "Will Smith eating spaghetti" companies didn't need perfect visuals. They needed excited early adopter customers. Now look where we're at.

In the fullness of time, all of these are just engineering problems and they'll all be sorted out. Focus on your customer.

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#107
post #104

This is so awesome, well done LemonSlice team! Super interesting on the ASR->LLM->TTS pipeline, and I agree, you can make it super fast (I did something myself as a 2-hour hobby project: https://github.com/acatovic/ova ). I've been following full-duplex models as well and so far couldn't get even PersonaPlex to run properly (without choppiness/latency), but have you peeps tried Sesame, e.g. https://app.sesame.com/ ?…

Thank you! Impressive demo with OVA. Still feels very snappy, even fully local. It will be interesting to see how video plays out in that regard. I think we're still at least a year away from the models being good enough and small enough that they can run on consumer hardware. We compared 6 of the major voice providers on TTFB, but didn't try Sesame -- we'll need to give that one a look. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18kq2JKAsSahJ6yn5IJ9g...

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#108

Sounds like an innovative approach, any IP protection on your tech? Have your early versions made any sort of profit? Absolutely amazing stuff to me. A teenager I very briefly showed it to was nonplussed - 'it's a talking head, isn't that really easy to do' ...

Haha, I kind of get that reaction. Convincing the world "this was hard to do" is generally not easy. Re: user uploads, we're operating in good faith at the moment (no built-in IP moderation). This hasn't been an issue so far. Current pricing reflects our operating costs. Each end-user gets a dedicated GPU for the duration of a call, which is expensive. Advancements on the model-side should eventually allow us to parallelize this.

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#109
post #101

"we're releasing our new model" is it downloadable and runnable in local? Could I create a "vTuber" persona with this model?

We have not released the weights, but it is fully available to use in your websites or applications. I can see how our wording there could be misconstrued -- sorry about that. You can absolutely create a vTuber persona. The link in the post is still live if you want to create one (as simple as uploading an image, selecting a voice, and defining the personality). We even have a prebuilt UI you can embed in a website, just like a youtube video.

Re: Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video

#110
Quick feedback if you're still monitoring the thread:

I did /imagine cheeseburger and /imagine a fire extinguisher and both were correctly generated but the agent has no context. when I ask what they are holding in both cases they ramble about not holding anything and referencing lemons and lemon trees.

I expected it to retain the context as the chat continues. If I ask it what it imagined it just tells me I can use /imagine.

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