Launch HN: Wondercraft (YC S22) – Use text-to-speech to create podcasts easily

thanks Magdy, there's 30 languages available on the app for anyone to create their podcast in. If there's enough interest for HN Recap in other languages we'll launch those!

Which language would you want it in?

Glad it’s proving useful!

What voice is used in the translated version? Is it somehow inferred from the voice in the original language? Or I just have to choose the voice in the target language?

Ha, look into this "person's" account. Created a few months ago and has ONLY responded to Wondercraft. What a sleazy practice, but I guess we should expect a total lack of integrity from such a product. What fun times we live in!

Thanks!

Thanks! We’re planning on adding a lot more!

No "Beating the Averages"?

Also, it's too bad it doesn't use PG's voice.

Thanks for listening @vishnuharidas! Any feedback always welcome and if you want more languages let us know which ones.

Compute to get this quality of text to speech is still quite expensive. Prices will drop as models become smaller. If you need more for now, we do offer Enterprise plans.

You can try https://pod-genie.com which is slightly cheaper but I must admin the voices aren't as good.

Great work Wondercraft team!

Full disclosure - I built pod-genie.

There's a pricing link at the top of the page, we should probably try to make this more visible: https://www.wondercraft.ai/pricing

Yes - this is full list. English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French, Polish, Hindi, Korean,, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Finish, Romanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Malay, Hungarian, Norwegian, Slovak, Croatian, Tamil

Thanks @colesantiago - great to hear. That's what we're trying to solve, the effort behind creating a podcast is just too much right now and a lot of content remains confined in text format.

Yeah you can have multiple voices on a single podcast in the current version.

You just need to add more than one section, and then alternate the voice you choose to talk.

Annotations for emotion are coming by the end of August.

Descript is an excellent "podcast editing" tool, but is not a "podcast creation" / text-to-speech first platform.

It offers "Overdub", but they suggest limited use of it (replacing 1-2 words), not full podcast creation. The quality of the text-to-speech model they use is not at the same level as the ElevenLabs model we are using, so I think someone would struggle to create an engaging podcast using Overdub. I'd also think that this is not a direction that Descript would be heading to, as they have built a successful business as a "podcast editing" platform and catering to "podcast creation" would be a significant change.

In addition to this, given that we are a "podcast creation" platform rather a "podcast editing" platform, we have focused on integrating functionality that allows users to go end to end in creating a podcasts. Examples: publishing a podcast (RSS), generating a video automatically, providing a shareable podcast page, autotranslating the podcast to other languages and a lot more.

Also https://audioread.com/. I love that you can forward emails to audioread and they'll be transcribed into podcasts. Thank you AI-voiced Matt Levine!

I use Speech Central with the Azure voices for listening to web articles as audiobooks/podcasts. It works quite well and is basically free. The azure voices are excellent. The text extraction engine of Speech Central fails to pull all the content out of some webpages, which is the biggest downside to this solution.

https://speechcentral.net/2023/04/14/harness-the-power-of-az...

We're lowering the barrier to create a podcast so that might happen to an extent, but on the flip side, valued written content that has been confined in text format can now find its way to audio format. Paul Graham essays is a good example: https://app.wondercraft.ai/p/myqXnyUD

Yeah it's a valid point, podcast consumption is definitely synonymous to commute.

I'd say these are some reasons for continued increase: - Commute has not fallen as much as we might think - More quality content is becoming available, bringing in more audience - Natural expansion from people enjoying the experience and sharing +++

The user holds all rights. Feel free to read

Terms of Service: https://wondercraft-ai.notion.site/Terms-of-Service-fbfc043c...

Privacy Policy: https://wondercraft-ai.notion.site/Privacy-Policy-f35636350f...

Making a GPT + text to speech wrapper is not complicated.

Providing all other features (e.g video generation, podcast publishing, auto translation and many other features we’ve added that allow for higher quality pod creation) increase the level of complexity for reproducibility.

Ultimately, we aim to keep building features that lead to higher quality pods, easier to build, and integration of ansiliary (video, translation, show notes) that will enhance our moat.

The barriers to entry are so low (for now), and everyone is scrambling to build a moat.

The AI image generation space has hundreds of players. Audio has dozens.

One likely outcome is that big tech will come to each of the "successful" companies with close peer competitors and offer to buy them. If they say no, they buy their competitor. Or build it internally.

You'll have to run really fast and hard to survive. I think it's totally doable, though, and this is a very interesting attack gradient.

Best of luck! It's exciting times.

This is copyright infringement, not ok to be using and monetising off of someone else’s voice. Over the next months there are plans for way tighter controls on this so I’d expect that the “using the voices of the original speakers” feature will not be available, unless a monetisation method is developed.

In relation to HN Recap, I agree that it struggles with terms, but I’d argue that the results show that the stories are captured well.

I get your point on people liking authentic stories from people and that’s the value of podcasts. There’s many different formats of podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20% of overall podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being those formats are best done person to person. But for all other podcasts (e.g news rundowns, narrations etc), podcasts generated on Wondercraft on a daily basis are proving that as long as human creativity is there podcasts created using TTS and other AI tools can be very engaging and appealing for many. That is ultimately how the flooding of such content is regulated as well, people will only listen to content that has thought behind it so creators will not find much value in “auto generated” podcasts.

Some people like those, some of the time. I too enjoy a good Conan or Hardcore History podcast but many other podcasts I listen to are basically audiobooks where, if the voice is good enough, I'll listen to them. History of Rome is a prime example, it's essentially a very long audiobook where the reading voice makes nearly no difference to me.

Don't tell me what I like. I don't care whether something is "told by humans" or not. In fact, HN Recap is the only podcast I listen to.

For the time being, realistically it’s cost prohibitive for users to generate slop without expectation for some return, so that’s a current natural mechanism.

As the prices decrease, due to model improvement, best/worst practice guides, and promotion of successful use cases may act as an additional mechanism to prevent such cases.

Realistically though, given that we’re lowering the bar of podcast creation to effectively the level of blog creation there might be an increase in slop content. I think that’s a necessary problem when you lower the barrier, but there will always be proper curation in the aggregator level. I think HM is the perfect example. Internet has made blogging so easy and there is so much slop. But it goes unnoticed given the curation.

Yeah hard to automate, but that’s why we built the UI to give the controls to everyone to make it as elaborate and high quality they want.

Thanks for kind words!

You can definitely use the platform for audiobooks. It's not native to importive an epub yet, but you can use the UI or the API to audify your book.

Strong words, but I understand where you’re coming from. I get your point on people liking authentic stories from people and that’s the value of podcasts. There’s many different formats of podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20% of overall podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being those formats are best done person to person. But for all other podcasts (e.g news rundowns, narrations etc), podcasts generated on Wondercraft on a daily basis are proving that as long as human creativity is there podcasts created using TTS and other AI tools can be very engaging and appealing for many.

There is so much written content currently confined in written format and we have built an app that makes it very easy to convert it to engaging audio. Paul Graham essays is a prime example.

If that necessarily means there is also some “fake” podcasts, that no one will listen to anyway, I think it’s a fair exchange.

So although I understand your position, no, we are by no means making the world worse.

I have to say I mostly agree and I'm very surprised at how few negative comments there are in this thread. It's good the community is supportive but with the current state of AI this product is essentially just spewing more nonsense into the world. (The podcast world already has more than enough human-generated nonsense) More importantly, I don't foresee much of a demand for this.

Hopefully the creators can either parlay a pseudo-success here and transition to something else, or, if AI drastically improves in the coming years, provide a more worthwhile service.

Many educators use Wondercraft right now as it also generates video which helps students. Check out if can be helpful to you.