00:00:01 · Ezekiel Iferia, Dan Price
[00:00:01] S0: Welcome to The Iferia Techcast, where we bring you all things, science, engineering, technology, and innovation. I'm your host, Ezekiel Iferia. And today, we are joined by Dan Price, a thirty five year audio advertising veteran and the founder of BionicVO, an AI powered voice platform that combines elite US voice talents with ethical AI practices. With over 1,000 industry awards, including Cannes Lions, Clios, and Radio Mercury Awards, Dan has produced audio campaigns for Google, IBM, Ford, AT&T, NBC, and Staples. Now he's on a mission to prove that technology and human craft aren't opposites. They are partners. So, Dan, I am truly honored and excited to welcome you to the show, sir. You very much for joining us. [00:01:04] S1: Thank you for having me. I'm excited too. [00:01:07] S0: It's great to have you here. Indeed, it's an honor. So, Dan, let's get this started. You know, let's let's start at the very beginning. You know, you've spent thirty five years in audio advertising, you know, won over 8,000 awards and created campaigns for, you know, for for for for big brands like Google Yeah. IBM, and Ford. So what what does an audio advertising producer actually do? You know, what's the craft behind the work that most people never think about?
00:01:39 · Dan Price
[00:01:39] S1: Yeah. It's a great question. I don't know that I've ever been asked that. Yeah. What we do is we're basically in business to help elevate brands' presence in what used to be mostly just radio. Now, of course, we call it audio because they could be on streaming services or podcasts or anything like that. Basically, the reason there's even a place for us in the advertising space is that it seemed like over all these years and past decades that at least at most big ad agencies, their energy was more into, to exaggerate a point, like the Super Bowl TV commercials. They would throw all their talented people at stuff like that, and the radio always paled in comparison. I mean, was very infrequent that you would hear a great radio commercial that you would talk about at the dinner table. And so my background was in audio engineering and sort of feeling like, Hey, I sort of get how I can contribute and make things better. And then I was hired to sort of run a department where I then was producing the ads, meaning I would oversee the casting. I do all the directing of the actors in the booth, and work with the engineer and tell him, Let's open this a little. Let's close this a little, and just sort of work through the whole process to make it best it can be. So I worked for a large company that did this very popular one back in the day called Burt Bars and Kirby, and Burt Burtus was a partner of Dick Orkin, who's sort of a legend in what we do. So I worked for him briefly and then spun off on my own, and my brother, who was very young at the time, he was six years younger than me, was working for a small ad agency, and I said, Hey, why don't you come and do this with me? And he did, and almost immediately we became busier and busier, and we're competing with those Bertus type companies. At first, we were hired mostly by ad agencies who wanted to elevate their radio. It's like they would say, Hey, have these scripts. Can you take them and run with them and see what you can do with them? But then eventually we became known as sort of like a radio ad agency ourselves, where we were creating everything from soup to nuts. Our model is that we've always maintained a huge writer's pool where I think right now our roster is probably 38 writers deep. My brother manages all of that. He's the creative director. He'll carve off a team.
00:04:41 · Dan Price, Ezekiel Iferia
Like a couple weeks ago, we did a big presentation to Staples. We probably had eight or nine writers writing on it. They generate 70 scripts. We're looking for one. We end up narrowing it down to the best dozen. We present it to Staples, they pick one, and then that becomes the big campaign moving forward. And that's sort of a good use of us. It's like we have all these great resources that contribute, and then we cast far and wide. Typically in the old days, was New York and LA exclusively. We had recording studios in both of those locations. Now it's all different. Post COVID, nobody does live auditioning anymore, but we orchestrate all of that. And then I'm still the one in the studio working with the actors and the engineer. So, that's kind of what we do. [00:05:41] S0: Alright. Alright. Thank you very much for clarifying that for us. So, know, you saw... Dan, you you saw the rise of AI voice technology, and instead of jumping on the bandwagon, now you noticed a quality gap. So what's wrong with most AI voices right now? You know, why do they sound technically perfect but emotionally flat?
00:06:07 · Dan Price
[00:06:07] S1: Yeah. Another good question. It's a great way of framing it. That's exactly what we noticed, that people were always talking about, Hey, the AI voices are getting better and better. Listen to this and all that. And by people, I mean, yes, some producers and people who are generating social media content and things like that, but mostly the people at those companies. That's where they seem to put most of their energy is they'll introduce 40 new voices, and they think that's their big pivotal kind of contribution or moment is that they keep throwing more and more voices out there. Or they'll say, Hey, we just introduced a sort of lever that you can maneuver and turn this woman into sound that has... She has a French accent, you know, and it's kind of like, okay, that's all great, but how do you use that practically in what we do for a living day in and day out? The answer is you don't. I've never had a spot come across my desk where it says, And mid sentence, this woman starts speaking French. It just isn't a thing. So we had been approached by three of those companies before they launched, asking for our opinion about certain things, whether it was the workflow, how things happened, was the cloning good enough, was the roster of voices good enough, all that kind of thing. Was the price good enough? And in our opinion, it never was any of those things. While the voices are getting more and more impressive that they're replicating or sounding like human voices, for us it always ended there because remember when I said, the way I make my living is in the booth directing actors through honestly, and without exaggeration, it could be 12,000 to 15,000 commercials I've done. So I, of all people, listen to these voices and I'm like, Boy, that copy was not interpreted the way it should have been. Our goal when we cast human beings is the job is always awarded to the person who ended up sounding... They all interpret it well or in different ways, but it always sounded like the person had written the commercial, that they were so connected to it and tethered to it, and it just sort of came out of them so naturally. That is impossible to program a computer to make those judgments and call upon past experience and make it authentic like that. That was the big gap that I noticed ten months ago.
00:09:06 · Dan Price, Ezekiel Iferia
I said, You know, if we can improve upon the voices themselves and make them sound even more human, but bring to our platform performance, the ability to create better performance, that's really going to be worth something because nobody's doing that right now. I never hear anybody advertising, Hey, we provide the tools to get great performances. It's all about, aren't these voices human sounding? That's the easy part. You just put it in the machine and it comes out sounding like a human. But we also felt we could improve upon that because those voices to me lack certain things like this authentic human distinctness that can only be human, at least now. I do think AI is going to get better and better and better, and it was nowhere several years ago. Imagine where it will be in fifteen years. It will sound every bit as much like a human, but it's the performance part that we sort of pride ourselves on providing users the tools to get these performances that we're achieving. So that's kind of how we're approaching the whole thing and our positioning in that space. [00:10:31] S0: Okay. So I like you to, you know, tell us more about Bionic You know, what what exactly... You know, what... What's the difference between what most ear voice sound like, you know, and what BionicVO does differently.
00:10:47 · Dan Price
[00:10:47] S1: Yeah. So it's really just we work harder at establishing the proper baseline for every actor that goes in. So the process is an actor will provide us with just a few minutes of audio. I have a team of four engineers. They've been doing this, working with me for quite a while now, cloning, and have become, in my opinion, the best collection of talented cloning people there are. They end up generating results that actually... Two weeks ago, I heard from a very big talent agent in New York, and she said, That is the best cloning I've ever heard ever, ever, was her quote. And the reason we get those kind of results is we spend on average seven hours working on thirty seconds of audio. We take the three minutes and we're trying to generate thirty seconds of very, very authentic cloned audio so that the actor... We don't stop until the actor says, You know, I played this for my husband, and he said, I cannot believe that wasn't you. Like they're blown away by it. But only at that point then do we start working on the performance. And the performance is very, very tricky. AI, that's why results are not great out there when you don't know exactly what you're doing. We'll clone a person's voice. They sound like me going in and they come out with a British accent. Or there's the slightest pea pop into a mic, and AI thinks you want that in there and it'll sprinkle it throughout. Or it'll listen to a child, think of it as a musical instrument, and start screwing around with the pitch of it. It's very, very tricky. So we study the audio that goes into the algorithms, and if we sense that any of it is throwing off the authenticity or even the performance the littlest bit, we pluck it out here in little pieces, little pieces, until it's just pure audio. And then we continue messing around with the various settings. In the beginning, there's technology where they sort of call it parroting, where as a director, I know how to interpret copy. I know in my head what it's supposed to sound like. I can read copy. I'm not a very good voiceover, but I can interpret. Well, you could feed that in the machine, my audio, and have these voices imitate me. So they have these great voices doing the proper interpretation.