00:03:39 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
[00:03:39] S0: a kid. [00:03:39] S1: Exactly. It's crazy because it's, of course, it's cheaper, easier to do, quicker timeline, but the quality is poor. As you can imagine, it's a pretty terrible experience. That was like a trigger point. In the future, that experience will be completely different. You will have original voice, original emotions, original intonation, and actually be able to experience that in that incredible way, which is very timely because just a week ago, released finally a model that is able to do that extremely well and finally bring the content from one language to another. But maybe more broadly, that was also our eye opening of how we interact with technology, how you can interact with food technology will change. And that will apply the language barrier that will break, but also just the general conversations with devices, digital world will happen differently across different modalities, across different channels. And we wanted to [00:04:32] S0: This is what you thought back in 2022 or what do think today? [00:04:34] S1: In 2022, we knew that you will you will need to unlock the stories, the content across the modalities and channels. We didn't yet know how quickly the shift from static to interactive will happen. We hope this will happen, but we didn't know how quickly. [00:04:48] S0: So the first idea was dub static content that I was watching. I'm watching a movie in Poland. I want this to actually feel like I'm watching in my native language. [00:04:58] S1: Exactly.
00:04:58 · Mati Staniszewski, David Senra
[00:04:58] S1: Exactly. [00:04:59] S0: That had to appear like a tiny business though, right, at the time? Like if that's your initial idea, you weren't going into it thinking this is going be a giant business, like you're one of the fastest growing startups today.
00:05:10 · Mati Staniszewski, David Senra
[00:05:10] S1: We actually thought it was a huge business at the time, too. Thought it was like if we think about all the content, all the stories out there, how incredible if they were available in audio and whether it's some of the biggest streaming companies, whether that's TV, whether that's the conversations, all of those could be actually delivered in the local language. We thought it's actually huge and I still think it's huge. And then if you shift this to to the end of the conversation we are having now, could this be in the future, this version where I speak Polish and you understand me in English, or I speak English and you understand me in any language that you want? In Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy, there's this idea of a bubble fish that you put next to the ear, and you can understand everything around you regardless of the language they speak. So, we knew that we will get there. But initially, it was like dubbing. So, I'll give you like a full way of how kind of it progressed. Initially, it was dubbing. And then as we started diving into what do we need to do to solve dubbing, we realized there are three steps in dabbing process. There is transcription step, then a translation step to another language, and then you need to regenerate that in another language. But the research that existed at the time for each of those steps wasn't very good. [00:06:18] S0: Which companies were doing the research? [00:06:21] S1: Those are good, NVIDIA models, open source models. [00:06:24] S0: But wait, it's just an independent researcher, so not any of the big companies?
00:06:27 · Mati Staniszewski
[00:06:27] S1: No, everything was poor. Everything was robotic. Everything was pretty robotic. It was still like you immediately tell that it was like a robotic voice and nothing really crossed that uncanny valley yet. There was one good open source paper, an open source repo that I'm trying to recall that was pretty good, but very unstable and still took so much time to generate. That was like the best. NVIDIA had some good research on some of those components for, especially on the speech to text side. Translation was okay ish. DeepL at the time was doing incredibly well. Then you had the kind of Google translate version of that. But all of the components to do dub were not good enough yet. So that's part one. The research wasn't there. And part two, when we started testing the dabbing idea with a lot of initiate creators, the message we are getting back from the creators is like, Great, I would love to get dabbing one day, but today I have different problems. My problems are I want to post produce and change the line that was recorded in the wrong way. Or before I record my video, want to be able to narrate the script and see how it sounds. Or instead of me speaking over a video, could I just have AI speak over that? So before I even think about dubbing, can you give me that? And that was, for us, was like, okay, before we can solve dubbing, let's solve the research component to generate speech and make it sound great. And on the product side, let's actually deliver for people to be able to just narrate content. So like, let's pan down and ignore for a second the language shift that just help bringing content alive with audio with a high quality.
00:08:07 · David Senra
[00:08:07] S0: I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the ramp data too. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Deel is how the best founder turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other a players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, we built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world.
00:10:11 · David Senra, Mati Staniszewski
Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com/senra. That is deal.com/senra. Let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly. You're like, we're gonna dub. We're gonna reach out to creators first. So I'm, you know, reaching a couple million people in English. Let me see if I can get this guy to say, hey, can I translate it? Can we dub this for Polish or in Spanish and all these other things? And then the feedback you're getting is, Yeah, that's kind of nice, but I have many more immediate concerns and can you help me with X, Y, Z? [00:10:43] S1: Exactly. And it's kind of was two things at the same time were great because that was also true on the research side where you have this like three steps you need to solve in dabbing. Nothing in the space is good. We need to solve one of those steps ourselves. That's where Piotr comes in and is able to create and assemble the best research team to solve it, and he himself is an incredible researcher to actually bring that to life. [00:11:02] S0: Yeah, because I'm friends with MrBeast. I remember talking to him about this a few years ago, where you know, he was the largest creator in the world, and he used to run separate YouTube channels. Yeah. And he told me, he's just like, yeah, well, for my Japanese, like, the Japanese versions of my videos, like, he doesn't just dub them. He'll hire, like, a voice actor that's like... The voice is famous in that country.