Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
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.
00:23:08 · Victoria Weller, S0
[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. [00:23:34] S0: Before we continue, today's episode is supported by our trusted gold partner, Redirect Health. If you've ever felt like you're overspending on health care and your employees can't even afford to use it, then listen up. Redirect Health offers health care benefits that finally make health insurance optional. It's a twenty four hour online primary care and Rx membership that protects your business by guiding employees before problems happen. That means you're not overpaying for coverage that you don't need. It's like your mom is your doctor. You'll always know the health care you need, where to get it, and when it makes sense to use the insurance so that you can pay the least. Redirect Health, protection for business, and guidance for people. Go check out redirectcoo.com. That's redirectcoo.com. And if you're talking to them, let them know that Cameron at the COO Alliance recommended you go there as well.
00:24:30 · Cameron Herold
[00:24:30] S3: Yeah. I was at the... I've gone to the main five day TED conference for eleven years and at TED, I think it was last year. It was either last year or three years, it must have been last year, they had this guy on stage singing and then all of a sudden his voice changes and it's this woman's voice and you see his mouth moving, you see him singing into a microphone and AI literally changed it to this woman's voice in a different language. We're like, what the fuck? This is like... It's really cool shit. Like this isn't... And and what I'm really frustrated around people speaking about AI right now is they're all talking about AI and they're talking about one software. They're talking about ChatGPT. That's one tool. I I have a dashboard called There's An AI For That and there's something like 8,000 different AI tools that exist and everybody's talking about one of them. So how do we get people to understand what Eleven does and to play with the tool? Who would you want playing with the tool to see the opportunities?
00:25:28 · Victoria Weller
[00:25:28] S1: Yeah. I do think that OpenAI has like a pioneer in creating that fundamental shift or creating that that mind blowing moment for people first interacting with ChatGPT and understanding, like, AI is here to change the world. Yeah. But then I think from the text space where ChatGPT operates to the visual space where DALL E or Midjourney operate, and then the voice space where ElevenLabs dominating at the moment. And I think the people to your question of who should be using it, I think there's also almost no limit to this. The immediate thought is content creators. So for example, you with podcasts or audiobooks, but also with shorter narration of videos or shorts even, like the voiceovers for any length of video or movie or film can be done with ElevenLabs. But then you can continue thinking about it, and if you have awareness just going through your day, you can see almost infinite use cases for text to speech. One of the most unique ones I found within our customer base is a hospital that uses ElevenLabs to read out before a surgery all the possible side effects and consequences and everything that has to be read out to the patient before Wow. The surgery. And for that, also, you understand why you wouldn't want it to be too robotic, and maybe even a doctor that reads this has to, like, rush through it and do robotics. So a really good use case for that, but not one that I would have thought of in a dark room coming up with with use cases. But one that I'm also really excited about is for accessibility. So we found that on the b to c side, there are many users that use ElevenLabs for text to speech, be it because they can... They're visually impaired and and they have a hard time reading. And it's so much nicer to have a human voice reading things to you rather than a robotic one, especially if you spend the majority of your day with text readers, etcetera. Or people that have lost their voice as a result of throat cancer or similar and or have trouble, like, with stutters or finishing their sentences. There's so many physical things that can impede your speech where ElevenLabs unlocks the option to speak again and even to speak again in your original voice. For those that have, like, changed their voice over the course of time, they can have their old voices back or even their their voice back, period.
00:28:08 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
So I think in the accessibility space, it's also super exciting. That's on the b to c side, and we also serve to enterprise customers. And there, it's another... You open a Pandora's box. And when there's just so much in there, like, from automotive to, like, that hospital use case to gaming studios to production companies, everywhere. The first moment I had with ElevenLabs was when I heard about it, and then I took the bus home. In every station, there's a voice that announces the next stop. And my mind just went to the operational costs of creating these recordings for me to know which bus stop is next. And then there's a diversion and suddenly the bus driver has to tell me what the next stop is. And somehow, it's almost impossible to understand them. And and so for me, I was like, okay, transportation, huge use case. Probably a smaller one if you look at our enterprise suite now, but even there, like in in day to day life, there's so much text to speech that could be leveraged. [00:29:17] S3: So I just thought of a bizarre use case. My mom passed away twenty years ago and there's an email that she wrote me that I reread frequently and it would be wonderful to be able to hear it in her voice and that would be something that if we ever had her voice, that could easily if I had videos of her speaking, I could train AI to be able to speak and then have her read the email to me of...