00:12:42 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:12:42] S0: We're talking a bit about kind of products here. And one thing I note is that LMs are amazing, and, you know, you have the usage stats of ChatGPT and Gemini and all the popular LMs where they're working and people use them a ton. It feels like there's a big product overhang when it comes to voice, where the leading edge voice models are incredibly capable. And yet, I was driving home the other day, and I needed to read a PDF. But I was driving, and so I said, okay. I'll just have my phone read the PDF to me. You can kinda try and hack it with, like, iOS screen reader, but it doesn't really work with the scrolling. And then in theory, you can upload a Gemini, but you're trying to get it to not summarize it and actually just hung when I tried to press the, like, read this to me button. And so there was no way I could get my phone to read me something, which seemed like a fairly basic, you know, feature. And, you know, all cars advertise voice control, and, yes, it sucks in separately. You know, if you want to, you know, input something to the navigation, just no car has a good version of that yet. Maybe Tesla does. And and and and so why does it seem like with LLMs and Claude Code and everything, we are using all the capabilities of the intelligence, whereas with voice, like we're living ten years ago somehow. [00:13:57] S1: Well, I'm thinking what I agree of the premise that we are ten years behind.
00:13:57 · Mati Staniszewski, John Collison
[00:13:57] S1: Well, I'm thinking what I agree of the premise that we are ten years behind. [00:14:01] S0: In the lived experience of people day to like, they're using series transcription, which has gotten better. Yeah. And it's still way behind the leading edge. [00:14:08] S1: Yeah. Like, there there is definitely a piece of, like, the the... Like, we... I think the technology in many of those cases is ready. There's a deployment gap to what you are saying. It's, like, in automotive or some of the big companies are not adopting that quickly enough or bringing that into the production. But, yeah, like, plenty of different problems that you need to fix along the way. I mean, the the the quality of voice models for them to actually sound good, like, this this is only, like, last three three years thing. [00:14:34] S0: Yeah. That's three years. [00:14:35] S1: It's it's a three years [00:14:36] S0: Paris have over the years software updates now. [00:14:38] S1: So so that's three years for the first voice model that can narrate Yes. Text async. Two years ago, you can start seeing the real time version of that, and not really. Like, it's I think the real break was like a year ago [00:14:49] S0: Okay.
00:14:49 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:14:49] S0: Okay. [00:14:49] S1: Where you could start seeing that in production. And then I think over 2025, the big piece that hasn't been possible is how you connect now the real time voice interaction with something which I think you are referring to. It has context of what you want to do, what is the material that you want to read, how does it connect to set off your preferences from the past Yes. And gets that across. I think that's, like, only recently became possible and where we've seen, like, kind of the big adoption across the enterprises leading on the technical side. Yes. I think this year, it should be in the automotive side too or the... Some of the applications side. [00:15:23] S0: Okay. So you think we'll start seeing kind of great voice models in cars this year? [00:15:27] S1: This year for the on cloud use cases, like on on on car, in car, so, like, without connectivity, not yet. 20... There's deployment, of course, gap of, like, how you bring that into the gaps. But I think, like, the next two years, three years... [00:15:41] S0: How about the PDF reading use case? That should work. Yeah. Well, how should I have done it? [00:15:48] S1: So back in the day, we... I'll preempt this with a story to cure 11 reader, but we we we had this problem. We have so many audiobook authors come into ElevenLabs. So 2023, we released first software. We had a lot of creators [00:16:01] S0: Mhmm.
00:16:01 · John Collison, Mati Staniszewski
[00:16:01] S0: Mhmm. [00:16:01] S1: And then a lot of audiobook authors or book authors that tried to... Couldn't afford Yeah. Professional innovation and wanted to create an audiobook. However, none of the companies accepted AI audiobooks. [00:16:12] S0: And you can't sell an AI audiobook on Audible or something. [00:16:14] S1: Exactly. So Audible would block AI content. So we had no choice. We need to create an avenue for them to... [00:16:21] S0: There was no distribution Exactly. For AI audiobooks. [00:16:24] S1: Exactly. So we created ElevenReader. Okay. And that kind of came with functionality where you can upload your PDF. You can upload your text and have it read out loud with a number of incredible voices. So whether it's sir Michael Caine all the way through to a state and working together with Sergei Feynman where where you [00:16:41] S0: got you were working with the sir Michael Caines of the world? [00:16:43] S1: Exactly. Okay. And then you can actually read it on that. And that kind of works extremely well. So that works. [00:16:48] S0: Yeah. [00:16:48] S1: Now how can you do it? Think Actually, I do [00:16:50] S0: want everything read to me by Michael Cain. [00:16:53] S1: It's a it's a great voice. Yeah. [00:16:54] S0: Shouldn't you guys have a consumer app where I can just do the common voice things? Like, I want to be able to have an Eleven app on my phone, and then if I upload a PDF to it, it can do the common things that I would like, such as have it read it to me. [00:17:06] S1: Yeah. That's that's exactly a reader. So that works.
00:17:06 · Mati Staniszewski, John Collison
[00:17:06] S1: Yeah. That's that's exactly a reader. So that works. [00:17:08] S0: Okay. The phone makers allow third party keyboards. Do you think they... Do they allow third party transcription engines? Will they, do you think? [00:17:17] S1: The phone makers, you said. Right? [00:17:18] S0: I mean, like Apple [00:17:19] S1: and and Google. Yeah. Yeah. They... So they're OS makers. Yeah. Not not not all of them. Android... And with Android, you can work through it. There's, like, you know, variations of that. Nothing. Tech and others. [00:17:29] S0: But, yeah, I feel like if you had a popular 11 app that allowed for transcription, people would use it a bunch, and maybe eventually Apple would say, oh, we should allow third party transcription engines if that's what people want. [00:17:38] S1: I mean, there is... It seems like they might be going in that direction. Right? And I recently... They announced that we'll open up the LLM ecosystem. Hopefully, they will do the same with voice ecosystem, which is kind of similar.
00:17:38 · Mati Staniszewski, John Collison
[00:17:38] S1: I mean, there is... It seems like they might be going in that direction. Right? And I recently... They announced that we'll open up the LLM ecosystem. Hopefully, they will do the same with voice ecosystem, which is kind of similar. [00:17:48] S0: But again, it's I think rational to do when it's moving so quickly. Yeah. The voice assistant paradigm is one of the oldest paradigm... You know, UI paradigms in computing, like the open the pod bay doors, Hal, from Yeah. '19 Yeah. '69. Yeah. I will claim it's not working yet. So Siri doesn't have the intelligence. And then on Gemini and ChatGPT and those apps, I mean, I want to use the voice mode, but I don't know about you. It just doesn't work. And so, like, sometimes I'll be using my phone, and I'll use the iOS keyboard transcription Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To type in the field and then, like, say a bunch of stuff and then send it off. But this suggests to me that consumers really want voice mode that works, and yet it's just not working yet for the major LLM apps or for anyone. Why isn't it working yet?