Great product, first of all. I can really see a use for it. Are you afraid that this is too easy to clone?
Someone with speechify: https://speechify.com/
And who wants to write a spotify API write code can do this.
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
#42Great product, first of all. I can really see a use for it. Are you afraid that this is too easy to clone? Someone with speechify: https://speechify.com/ And who wants to write a spotify API write code can do this.
Making a GPT + text to speech wrapper is not complicated.
Providing all other features (e.g video generation, podcast publishing, auto translation and many other features we’ve added that allow for higher quality pod creation) increase the level of complexity for reproducibility.
Ultimately, we aim to keep building features that lead to higher quality pods, easier to build, and integration of ansiliary (video, translation, show notes) that will enhance our moat.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#43[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#44Great product, first of all. I can really see a use for it. Are you afraid that this is too easy to clone? Someone with speechify: https://speechify.com/ And who wants to write a spotify API write code can do this.
Making a GPT + text to speech wrapper is not complicated. Providing all other features (e.g video generation, podcast publishing, auto translation and many other features we’ve added that allow for higher quality pod creation) increase the level of complexity for reproducibility. Ultimately, we aim to keep building features that lead to higher quality pods, easier to build, and integration of ansiliary (video, transl…
Amazing work. Listening a bit to the HN podcast, I'm impressed by the natural-sounding pronunciation of technical terms with non-obvious phonetics like 'postgres'. Have you had to tweak a lot of these manually to get them sounding so good or is your model mostly getting them right?
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#45I was half expecting this to be Wondery spinning off whatever they do to make all their narrators sound like robots.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#46Podshorty 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
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a GPT + text to speech wrapper is not complicated. Providing all other features (e.g video generation, podcast publishing, auto translation and many other features we’ve added that allow for higher quality pod creation) increase the level of complexity for reproducibility. Ultimately, we aim to keep building features that lead to higher quality pods, easier to build, and integration of ansiliary (video, transl…
Amazing work. Listening a bit to the HN podcast, I'm impressed by the natural-sounding pronunciation of technical terms with non-obvious phonetics like 'postgres'. Have you had to tweak a lot of these manually to get them sounding so good or is your model mostly getting them right?
Yeah Postgres is a great example, it comes up often in HN.
We have a small map of tweaks, and our users keep feeding us with more. The model performs great on its own most of the time though.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazing work. Listening a bit to the HN podcast, I'm impressed by the natural-sounding pronunciation of technical terms with non-obvious phonetics like 'postgres'. Have you had to tweak a lot of these manually to get them sounding so good or is your model mostly getting them right?
Yeah Postgres is a great example, it comes up often in HN. We have a small map of tweaks, and our users keep feeding us with more. The model performs great on its own most of the time though.
Very cool. By accumulating lots of these tweaks, I feel like you're also going to have an opportunity to backdoor your way into a great text-to-speech API product as well if you have any interest in going that direction. It seems like the main challenge there is ironing out all the edge cases and you've created an excellent feedback loop for accomplishing that.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#49Podshorty 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 think it's totally doable, though, and this is a very interesting attack gradient.
Best of luck! It's exciting times.
Re: Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily
#50Different but related idea, this creates a personal podcast feed: https://reca.st
I use Speech Central with the Azure voices for listening to web articles as audiobooks/podcasts. It works quite well and is basically free. The azure voices are excellent. The text extraction engine of Speech Central fails to pull all the content out of some webpages, which is the biggest downside to this solution.
https://speechcentral.net/2023/04/14/harness-the-power-of-az...