Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:16:32 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:16:32] S3: Yeah. [00:16:32] S1: They pee a lot, reduce the blood volume, everything's back to normal. They have a great time while they're up there and everything's like transferred... The blood is transferred up. But then when they go back to earth and everything's pulled to their feet, they often, like, they can't walk or they would faint when they walk. Wow. And there are many things that you can do to prevent that in a couple chapters in that book where it's about, like, what you can do to one, like, study it on Earth without having to go to space to see what happens, but also what can you do, be it like drink a bunch of salt water before returning to earth to make sure that once you arrive, you are actually more okay than you would be if you didn't have any anti precautionary measures. [00:17:17] S3: Okay. So like that science seems to be extraordinarily fascinating and also extraordinarily useful considering that we're working towards this being an interplanetary species where we are, you know, doing more in space. We are looking at potentially colonizing Mars. Like these are answers that are not only intriguing, but also we need to understand this soon. [00:17:39] S1: Yeah. Soon. Soonish. Soonish. Okay. Alright. Think I think relevant for Mars One, but I think AI is more relevant to the average. [00:17:51] S3: Alright. So so better left for a dinner party conversation than still. So then [00:17:55] S1: For another Burning Man conversation.
00:17:55 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:17:55] S1: For another Burning Man conversation. [00:17:56] S3: Yeah. Another Burning Man conversation. So then you then you get to work in AI. I mean, clearly it is the hottest industry and business areas being talked about today. And you're in the in the kind of text to speech side of things which is also super intriguing because, so so talk to us a little bit about what ElevenLabs is working on.
00:18:17 · Victoria Weller
[00:18:17] S1: Yeah. ElevenLabs, as you mentioned, is a text to speech company. And our mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and voice. So you could dub a podcast that is still spoken in your voice into another language. That's like the the goal. The more immediate use cases are inputting text and outputting audio. For example, if you want to create an audiobook, you can upload the EPUB file, that is the format in which audiobooks come, and then you can immediately instantly create the spoken version of that. You can even go as far as instead of having one voice read the entire audiobook, you can give each character their own voice and then have the dialogues with different characters, which I think is in... Is such a fun improvement to what... How we know audiobooks at the moment. So those are two examples of how text to speech can be used. And ElevenLabs is one of the the leading AI companies in that space with the best models that are really great at creating emotionality in the voices and having contextual awareness as well. And this contextual awareness is where AI really really feeds in and where AI has allowed a breakthrough for text to speech compared to how, you know, Alexa speaks or Siri speaks, where the model understands what it is saying and therefore can say it in exactly the right way. So you could say a sentence and it's like, hi, my name is Victoria. I'm really sad. And that will come out sounding a lot sadder than if you'd say, hi, I'm Victoria. I'm so happy. That would come out like more excited because of the context of that sentence. And you could also clone voices, so you could have that sentence spoken in by me without me having to sit and record it in the first place in the happy and the sad version potentially.
00:20:20 · Cameron Herold, S0
[00:20:20] S3: Yeah. What I what I love about 11, and I've heard about 11 now over the last few months almost weekly. Someone has mentioned it [00:20:27] S0: for for a few for
00:20:29 · Cameron Herold
[00:20:29] S3: a few reasons and I'll and I'll talk about why I'm excited. I'm I'm gonna become a client quite quickly. I love also that it can also add the inflection and the intonation into the speech as well, so that it it literally does take the written word and it doesn't sound robotic, it really does sound like we would speak. So the reason I'm excited about it, I went into studio a year ago today to record my my sixth book. It's called The Second in Command. And I spent two and a half days in studio in Dubai recording my audiobook and I literally felt like poking my effing eyes out with my pen. Like I was just like, someone kill me. This was eight hours a day standing trying to actually be excited. Well my content's really good but it's hard for me to be excited reading it. I'm also not that great at reading. I'd rather stand in front of a thousand people than stand and read to someone. And then to try to throw the inflection and the intonation in and without having to like read it and then also go on these little hyperlinks because I wanted to add more information that was probably coming in the next chapter anyway. And then all of a sudden I find out that I could literally now like now that I've read that entire book, I can upload it. I can take a few of my speaking events and upload that content. That will train your system AI, and then I could upload my other five books, and your system could literally punch out the audio recording for me without me having to spend what would now be fourteen more days in studio. Exactly. You could be It's done fucking amazing. Yeah. So it also when I had to pay the authors to read my other five books, I paid them $6,000 each. I don't love their voice. They do sound a little bit kind of robotic. And strangely, people still want... Because I've done so many paid speaking events, I've been paid to speak in 28 countries. I have this audience of people that want to read my content, but they want to hear me reading it for some reason. Like we want And to they want your voice. Yeah. And they they just don't like Fred who's reading it even though Fred sounds fine. Right? Yeah. So so how the fuck does the system work? How does this... How does 11 work?
00:22:29 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:22:29] S1: Yeah. That's a great question. And another use case, so so quickly before we dive in a bit more into the tech, The other day when you lost your voice, you potentially could have continued recording podcasts if you would have implemented some text to speech there as an idea. So [00:22:45] S3: Well, that [00:22:45] S1: both saving time in the studio, but also saving time at home. [00:22:48] S3: Did actually also write down that I'm gonna take a look at at using 11 to also transcribe our podcast into a number of the best languages. Like there's no reason why we shouldn't do, you know, Mandarin, Spanish, French, German. That's probably enough. I mean, what... Like, what would the big five or six be? [00:23:08] S1: Those are definitely on Definitely, the of the it's something that we... That ElevenLabs offers as well. ElevenLabs has 28 languages that you can choose from many many more voices, but you can also upload your own voice. And Mandarin, Spanish, German, French are all in there. You could even do English to English from your voice to Fred's voice or vice versa.