00:15:17 · Dan Price
[00:15:17] S1: Well, we try and be the exact opposite of that. We feel as though, because the very first calls I made when I had this idea were not to agents, they weren't to producers at ad agencies, It wasn't to SAG-AFTRA. All that came later. I started with actors because those... I have friends in the business, dozens of them that I've worked with for five, ten, forty years in a couple cases, and they trusted me. That's why they jumped into this. They didn't even know what the rates were going to be. They just said, You're doing it. I'm in, because I know you're going to handle this ethically, and you're going to handle my cloning with care and all that kind of thing. So we're very motivated to address all of those kinds of issues. What we've kind of built into it are a few things. One is that when an actor comes to be onboarded, they are encouraged to list any sort of conflicts they might have. It could be a specific political party. It could be a brand. It could be a category. Hey, I don't want to do hard alcohol or beer or something like that. It could be anything like that. So as a user goes through and harvests his list of... His shortlist of people he wants to audition, the people who have opted out never even make it to that stage. They're not even hosted as an option to be used in the first place for that. Once the user goes and does some auditioning, that's all watermarked so that it's rendered useless to them. The only time they are given the clean audio to work with is when they've committed to the transaction and actually paid money and hit the button to make the transaction happen, and then in their studio appears the clean audio, and they're then free to generate more takes and import music, and sound effects, and speed things up, and edit, whatever. And we, a few weeks ago, and this is not to say we by any means have installed this, but we've talked to developers about engaging them to create for us an inaudible watermark that would sort of fingerprint all of this audio that leaves our space so that we'd be able to track it, and learn that if someone told us, Hey, this radio commercial is airing in Dayton for three months, and in fact it's airing in Chicago for six on television, that we'll know all about that. So we intend to be very aggressive about those things.
00:18:12 · Dan Price, Ezekiel Iferia
Our users need to sign a master agreement and also a per job agreement, limiting them from using it for unethical purposes or in unethical ways, or using it in ways that they did not indicate that they would be using it. So we're doing everything we can to try and bring comfort and confidence to actors once they commit [00:18:36] S0: to Oh, okay. Okay, Dan. There's a lot of fear that AI will replace human voice actors. So what's your take on this? Is is AI going to make voice actors obsolete, or, you know, is there a different future?
00:18:56 · Dan Price
[00:18:56] S1: I'd love to say, Well, no, no way, but there's a decent chance that those in that position will try to make that happen. It's funny, not long ago, I had a conversation with this group at SAG-AFTRA who was very into this platform. They liked how we were approaching everything. And they asked me a question that they said, you know, since the strike of the year 2000, 80% of all voiceover work is being done by non union voices. She said to me, How long do you think it'll take until 80% of all that work will start being handled by AI voices? Just knowing what I know about where the technology's come in the last few years, and the work I see being done out there, I said to her, I could see like three or four years that occurring. She said, We here at SAG-AFTRA believe it will take eighteen months for that to happen. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but they believe it to be true. And so that means there's a lot of urgency out there on the part of actors when they learn about this platform we've put together. We take a lot of emails and calls and inquiries about getting on board because they, like us, want to get out ahead of this. As one of my first actors that I spoke to about this idea said in the very beginning, The train is coming. I can either get out of the way, get run over, or get on board with it, because there's nothing we can do about it. So my whole position is, well, let's do things better than are being done now. Let's become the accepted way of doing things so that as AI gets better and better, maybe people will be less inclined to make that jump because we're already doing things the way they should be. In a weird way, we're actually the ones using AI for the benefit of human beings because this is all work they never would have been considered for in the first place. It's work we're defending against going to AI and to recapture work that's already going there, and we're using AI to do it, but it's with these great actors' voices. And so, you know, we're we're we're trying to do our part to not let that happen.
00:21:27 · Ezekiel Iferia
[00:21:27] S0: Alright. So, Dan, you know, I'd like to, you know, dwell more on the relationship between real voice actors, you know, and technology you are, you know, building. So, like, how do you work with real voice actors on BionicVO? You know, what's like the relationship between the human talent and the technology?
00:21:50 · Dan Price
[00:21:50] S1: So they're very involved in the beginning of this. I don't know how other platforms do it if they just sort of take audio, scrape it, and use it for their own purpose. Ours is not like that at all. We work with the actor through that whole process, that seven hour process, and it's not a continuous thing. It's like today, probably this morning, six or seven actors alone reacted to audio we sent them overnight, And they'll either say, Boy, that's awfully close, or Man, you nailed it, or I'm not so sure. Can you try this or that? So we work with them through that whole process so that they're happy because what I want is for them to be super enthusiastic about this platform so they elevate it, so they talk about it, they get out there on social media and push it. In fact, that's one of the reasons I've promised all of them, and we'll continue to make this promise, that we are not going to be all about having a ton of voices on there. Our claim is that we have the very best voices in the business on there. And because we claim that, that means there aren't going to be 4,000 voices, because there aren't 4,000 people great at this. Are there 90? Are there 140? Are there two sixty? I'm not sure of the number. I tend to think it's somewhere in those numbers that I mentioned, but that's for two reasons. One is we want these members to get all the work. I don't want them to be lost in the shuffle because person number 1,900 was listened to before they were. I want them to get the work so that they're motivated by that. But also, I want to just make it flat out very difficult to compete with this platform. If we have the best voices, no one else is going to be able to say that they do. We're also installed, which is sort of not exactly what you asked about, but we installed and integrated our own workstation, which took many months to put in there, but we don't want people to feel as though they ever need to leave. You know, that they have all the tools they need in there to do all the mixing, all the editing, just as if it's not a Pro Tools setup, but it's way better than the other platforms out there. So, you know, we're trying to do things in a way to make it later difficult to compete with, but as I say, that has a lot to do with these actors because I really value that they make up the whole thing. As I said, it's a two part thing.
00:24:37 · Dan Price, Ezekiel Iferia
We can do our part helping with the performance, but we need these great vocal cords on our platform, these people that just have these wonderful voices, and, you know, and then that's how the partnership has worked. [00:24:52] S0: Alright. That that was a really detailed response. I love how you went into the depths to give a really clear explanation of it. So you are, you know, you you are you are you are not really a technologist who discovered boys. No. You are a creative who spent 35 mastering the craft of audio storytelling done. So what was it like, you know, to build a tech company from that perspective? You know, what did you have to learn that you never expected?