No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:02:46 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:02:46] S0: I think this is such a... You're an amazing founder, but I also think this is such an interesting company because it is very unintuitive to, I think, many people and investors in particular. I don't know if you faced this at the beginning, but I remember both here in 2022, there's a there's a class of companies that allow creation in some way when we look at your, like, first business beyond the research itself. And I would put Eleven and Midjourney and Suno and Haejin in this category. And I think there's, like, this overall sense of, like, who really wants to do this? What was your initial read of, like, how many people want to make voices or what made you believe that was gonna be much broader than... Like, if I look at dubbing, for example, it's not a huge market. I think [00:03:32] S1: first piece was... Which is, as you mentioned, there is, like, a very... It's very tricky to do both the product and the research. [00:03:38] S0: Mhmm.
00:03:38 · Sarah Guo, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:38] S0: Mhmm. [00:03:39] S1: I'm in in a lucky position that I... That my co founder and I known each other for fifteen years. I think he's the smartest person I know. Mhmm. And has been able to create a little of that research work to be able to create that foundation to then elevate that experience. But both of us are from Poland originally, and the original belief came from Poland. It's very peculiar thing, but if you watch a movie in Polish language, a foreign movie in Polish language, all the voices, whether it's a male voice or a female voice, are narrated with one single character, so you have like a flat delivery for everything in the movie. [00:04:09] S0: That's a terrible experience. [00:04:10] S1: It is a terrible experience, and it's still, like, you grow up, as soon as you learn English, you switch out and you don't want to watch content in this way, and it's crazy that still happens until today in this way for a majority of content. Combining that, and I worked at Palantir, and my co founder worked at Google, we knew that that will change in the future, and that all the information will be available globally. And then as we started digging further, we realized... [00:04:36] S0: So, in every language in a high quality way. Exactly. [00:04:40] S1: And big thing was like, instead of having it just translated, could you have the original voice, original emotions, original intonation carried across? [00:04:52] S0: Mhmm.
00:04:52 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:04:52] S1: So, like, imagine having this podcast, but say people could switch it over to Spanish, and they still hear Sarah. They still hear Mati and and the same voice, the same the same delivery, which is kind of exactly what we did with Lex back when he interviewed Narendra Modi, and you could kind of immerse yourself in that story a lot better. So, that was the original kind of insight, and we then started digging further, which is that just so much of the technology we interact with will change. Whether this is how you create, it's still relatively tricky to bring voice alive. You would need to go through the expensive process of hiring a voice talent, having a studio space, having expensive tooling to then actually adjust it, the tooling isn't intuitive to be able to do this, so all that creation process will and should change to make it easier for new people with keenness to bring that to life, then a lot of the technology wasn't possible for you to be able to recreate a specific voice or be able to create that in that high quality way. And then, of course, as we dived into further and shifted away from the static piece, the whole interactive piece is still crazy in the way it functions, where most of us have seen this technological evolution over the last decades, but you still will spend most of your time on the keyboard, you will look at the screen, and that interface feels broken. It should be where you can communicate with the devices through speech, through the most natural interface there is, one that started when the humanity started, and we realized we want to solve that. And I think now, forward from 2022, I feel like many people will carry that belief too that voice is the interface of the future. As you think about the devices around us, whether it's smartphones, whether it's computers, it's robots, speech will be one of the key ones, but I think 2022 it wasn't, and as you think about the market for the creative side or for that interactive side, it was very clear it will be a huge, a huge, huge one.
00:06:52 · Sarah Guo
[00:06:52] S0: So even when you think about just the research part of your business, and then you have products for at least two different markets, and then you have this larger mission, a lot has changed in the last five or ten years. But it used to be a very strongly held traditional belief of like, one must do one thing well in a startup, and there's no other path. Like, you're treating this like an interaction company, a platform company. How did you think about sequencing the research and the product effort? Does that make sense? Or thinking about new markets? And maybe wrapped up in that question too is just like, well, where are we in quality voice as well? Because would sort of claim, like, if the models are not good enough for certain use cases at all, like, it kind of doesn't make sense. Due product?
00:07:36 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:07:36] S1: And I think that's right. It's almost exactly like when we started originally, what we did was try to actually use existing models that were in the market and optimize them for our first use case was actually starting with a combination of narration and dubbing, and then on the creative side, and we realized pretty quickly that the models that existed just produced such a robotic and not good speech that people didn't want to listen to it, and that's where my co founder's Genius came in, he was able to assemble the team and do a lot of the research himself to actually create a new version of creating that work. But, like, to your question, I think that the way we are kind of organized internally and how we think about sequencing a lot of that was looking at the first problem and then creating effectively a lab around that problem, which is like a combination of mighty researchers, engineers, operators to go after that problem. And the first problem was the problem of voice. So how can we recreate the voice? And like you say, it needs to have that research expertise to be able to do that well. So we started with effectively a voice lab, which was that mission of can we narrate the work in a better way. There was a combination of roughly five people that were doing that work, and then sequenced the research first, and then built a simple layer on top of that work to allow people to use that work, and then kind of expand it from there with a holistic suite for creating a full audiobook, and then creating a full movie narration, or movie dab. And then we move to the next problem, which is the realization that okay, we have solved the voice, great for making content sound human, the first problem. For that to be useful for us to interact with the technology, you need to solve how you bring the knowledge on demand into that. So, we effectively started then the second team, which was a second lab, an agent lab effectively, which was a team that would combine researchers, engineers, and operators once more, which would try to fix, okay, we have text to speech. How do they now combine this with LLabs and speech to text and orchestrate all those components together while integrating that with other systems to make it easier.
00:09:41 · Mati Staniszewski, Sarah Guo
And then similarly, you know, you kind of expand from looking just at the voice layer into how those systems work together, and here too, you need the research expertise to do that in a low latency way, efficient way, accurate way, but at the same time there's that product layer that starts forming that it's not only the orchestration that matters, it's also the integrations of how you link up to the legacy systems, how you build functions around it, or how you deploy that in production and test, monitor, evaluate over time. [00:10:11] S0: Do you feel like you were creating new use cases when you built the tools? Do people know that they wanted to do this already? Because one argument like that I remember hearing was like, ah, like, you know, enterprises don't know what to do with voice. How many people really want to do it? And then you're serving essentially like perhaps the creator publisher side of Right. Your Yeah.