No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:34:31 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:34:31] S1: We have now a number of different initiatives across the audio space, and there are kind of two big buckets, and roughly they will relate to that creative and agent side. On the creative side, what this means, we did text to speech models that are controllable. We then added speech to text model that transcribes in a high accurate way, but across a low resource languages as well, so covering almost 100 languages. Then created a music model, a fully licensed music model. And as you think about the future, it's how those models will also interact with some of the visual space. So that's a lot of effort in how you can get the best of audio and then potentially combine that with existing video that you have to really have the best delivery. And then on the agent side, it's of course how you optimize the real time speech to text, real time text to speech. We just released our speech to text model, Scribe v2, which is under 150 milliseconds, 93.5% accuracy across the top 30 languages on FLEURS, and it's only top 30 here because we serve so many others, but most of the people don't, so it's beating all the models on benchmarks. But as you think about the future, it's also the orchestration piece of how you bring speech to text LLM and text to speech. We'll be releasing over the next couple of months a new orchestration mechanism that will lower the end to end part, we think, in a great way, but second thing, which is what is so hard, is not going to only allow you to combine those pieces, but add also the emotional context of the conversation, so you can actually respond with the model, and we think in more expressive and in a better way. And in the future, and something we're investing is parallelizing a speech to speech, more fused approach as well. And of course, depending on the use case, if you are an enterprise reliable use case, the cascaded approach is the approach for the next year to... Has more structure, yeah. More structure, you have more visibility into each of the steps, it's reliable, I'll call tools.
00:36:26 · Mati Staniszewski, Sarah Guo
If you're feeling more expressive and can hallucinate, speech to speech might be the choice, and maybe over time you'll see them kind of go one over another depending on the industry, but that's like a huge investment on our side, which is where the foundation of all the platform and the main part that we are continually investing in is a plethora of different models that combine the best of audio with some of the best of the other modalities together. [00:36:52] S0: I wanna take our last few minutes and ask you a few questions about just the future that I think you'll have a really good point of view on given you think about voice and audio all the time. What do you think of AI companions? [00:37:04] S1: I think they will be a big thing and exist in a big way. Not something I'm personally excited about or something that we spend much time on, but I think the whole line of what's an assistant, companion, character that you enjoy as part of experience were kind of blurry and bland to a large extent. [00:37:26] S0: I think can be very common, but you're not, like, enthusiastic personally about it. [00:37:30] S1: I'm more excited about, like, more of the Jarvis version of that, or more of like I have a super assistant super pilot, kind Versus [00:37:39] S0: the social version.
00:37:39 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:37:39] S0: the social version. [00:37:40] S1: Versus the social version. I think it just would be such an incredible unlock, and it's also like it's a... And it's something blending in that personal life context. I would love to start the day, and like someone that understands me, and like start and tell me what's like relevant to me, and open the blinds, and then like tell me about the weather and the sunshine, and play music straight away. [00:38:01] S0: It's gonna happen. [00:38:01] S1: It's gonna happen. That I'm excited for. I think the companion use cases will mention solving loneliness in that part. I think that's one way. Maybe there are like different ways of engaging people back. I do think there will be an interesting future, even if you think about education, where you will have superpower with learning from AI tutors. But I think on the flip side of that, and I think this will, like this is my personal take, you will have education, a good percent of time spent with AI tutors, but then explicit percent of time spent without any technology, human to human, so you can kind of learn that part too. [00:38:38] S0: Yeah, I think this is the correct model, both in terms of emotional guidance and coaching and guardrails, right, as well as like pure pure learning. [00:38:50] S1: Yeah. [00:38:51] S0: What do you think about dictation or what happens in terms of how we control technology that isn't necessarily personified as well? Or does it just all become personified?
00:38:51 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:38:51] S0: What do you think about dictation or what happens in terms of how we control technology that isn't necessarily personified as well? Or does it just all become personified? [00:39:03] S1: I think not all personified. I think like some, you know, communicative and often and harm probably will like stay pretty static and [00:39:10] S0: code, I might just [00:39:11] S1: Yeah. Exactly. You don't probably need that much of additional emotional input, I think it's going to be a huge part where, like, in a way, what I hope will happen is you will have ability to stay more immersed in the real life with the devices going back into the pocket, back into some version of an attached element, assuming that's in the right setting, and that kind of acts on your behalf. And in many ways, like, let's say dictation, it's, as Karpathy says, decade of agents, let's call it decade, then you'll have a decade of robots. If you are interacting with robots, of course voice will be the input and the output as one of the key interfaces, so you will need that dictation as huge part. But similarly... [00:39:56] S0: I think the robot's going be personified. [00:39:58] S1: Yeah, relatively. 100. 100%. Yeah, no. I think most of the use cases will be personified. [00:40:04] S0: Okay, last one. What's one thing that you've seen already exist today, or if you project out a few years, will change about how we interact with content? Maybe it's like personalized voice content, or just something people are gonna do with AI voice that they don't do today, or that not everybody knows about.
00:40:04 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:40:04] S0: Okay, last one. What's one thing that you've seen already exist today, or if you project out a few years, will change about how we interact with content? Maybe it's like personalized voice content, or just something people are gonna do with AI voice that they don't do today, or that not everybody knows about. [00:40:24] S1: I think still the biggest one that hasn't yet kicked into the system is how education will be done. I think learning with AI with voice, where it's on your headphone or on a speaker, It's just going to be such a big thing where you have your own teacher on demand and who understands you very personified and kind of delivers the right content through your life. I think this will be one of the biggest use cases, and I don't think it happened yet. I think we see of course some of the commercial partners, but schools, universities, how that's deployed in a safeguarded way, in a way that supports the other part of education, the social part of education, I think all of that will evolve, and maybe there's a cool version of that where you have like Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein deliver those lecture notes or other teachers that you love. It'll be sick. [00:41:14] S0: That's a great note to end on. Thanks for doing this, Mati. [00:41:16] S1: Sarah, thanks so much.
00:41:16 · Mati Staniszewski, Sarah Guo
[00:41:16] S1: Sarah, thanks so much. [00:41:20] S0: Find us on Twitter at No Priors Pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way, you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.