Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:22:09 · Cameron Herold
[00:22:09] S1: 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 for for a few for a few reasons, and I'll and I'll talk about why I'm excited. And 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 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 when 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 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 I... 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 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.
00:23:41 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:23:41] S2: Exactly. You could be done today. [00:23:43] S1: It's fucking amazing. [00:23:45] S2: Yeah. [00:23:45] S1: 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 wanna hear me reading it for some bizarre reason. Like, we wanna hear [00:24:08] S2: And they want your voice. [00:24:09] S1: 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? [00:24:19] S2: Yeah, that's a great question. And another use case, 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 just as an idea. So both saving time in the studio, but also saving time at home.
00:24:19 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:24:19] S2: Yeah, that's a great question. And another use case, 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 just as an idea. So both saving time in the studio, but also saving time at home. [00:24:44] S1: I did actually also write down that I'm going to take a look 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, like, what would the big five or six be? Hey, it's Cameron. I hope you're loving today's episode. Quick question for you. Does your company have a strong leadership training program in place to grow the skills of everyone who manages people? If you want to help yourself and your company grow, get everyone who manages people learning from my Invest in Your Leaders online training program. There are 12 core leadership skills that I cover online, and they're all going to really grow. CEOs pay me $78,000 a year to coach them one on one, and now you can all benefit for 1% of what they pay me. These are the same leadership skills that I created and certified everyone in at one-eight 100 GOT JUNK when I was there as COO. Go to investinyourleaders.com today and use promo code podcast10 before the end of the month to get 10% off each manager you sign up. Now back to the show. [00:26:05] S2: Those are definitely [00:26:07] S1: Definitely on
00:26:07 · Cameron Herold, S0, Victoria Weller
[00:26:07] S1: Definitely on [00:26:07] S0: top of the [00:26:09] S2: some 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. [00:26:31] S1: 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 Yeah. 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?
00:27:28 · Victoria Weller
[00:27:28] S2: Yeah, I do think that OpenAI has like a was 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. 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 is 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 audio books, but also with shorter narration of videos or shorts, even like the voiceovers for any length length of video, 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 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 is too robotic. So a really good use case for that, but not one that I would have thought of in a dark room coming up with use cases. But one that I'm also really excited about is for accessibility. So we found that on the B2C side, there are many users that use ElevenLabs for text to speech, be it because they can they're visually impaired 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, etc. 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 that where ElevenLabs unlocks the option to speak again and even to speak again in your original voice. For those that have changed their voice over the course of time, they can have their old voices back or even their voice back period. So I think in the accessibility space, it's also super exciting.
00:30:23 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
That's on the B2C side. And we also serve to enterprise customers. And there it's another, you open a plethora box, think it's called, right? Pandora's box. When there's just there's 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. And 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 so for me, was like, okay, transportation, huge use case, probably a smaller one if you look at our enterprise suite now. But even there, like in day to day life, there's so much text to speech that could be leveraged. [00:31:34] S1: 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. That would be something that if we ever had her voice that could easily, find videos of her speaking, could train AI to be able to speak and then have her read the email to me of. [00:31:52] S2: Yeah. You know what, that is actually a use case that comes up a lot for for mothers, but also other family members. [00:32:00] S1: And we