5 ms·
DeepGram (YC W16) Is Building a Google for Audio
- Xcelerate 11y agoI posted this comment five days ago. It seems like audio indexing and searching might be the next big thing. > I've been wanting to make something like this for a while. Really nice product you have! I think this kind of service will really take off in the future. Imagine having an app that constantly records everything and allows you to search it later. Questions like "What did James tell me last November about traveling to Europe?". It would also eliminate hearsay, since you would no longer have to trust one person's word against another — you could simply search the transcript of that moment in the past. In the very long run, I almost wonder if such a tool would make lying obsolete.
- noajshu 11y agoI'm Noah, one of the founders. I also think lifelogging will be common in the future because it's becoming easier to record everything and the benefits of having that dataset are also increasing (that's where we come in) You're correct that lying could become obsolete. It could be sort of like the changes brought on by the Information Age, where now it's pointless to argue over truths that are the public domain (since we can just look up the fact whenever we need). It would extend that to private life.
- foobarqux 11y agoHave you seen "The Entire History of You" episode of Black Mirror?
- noajshu 11y agoIt's one of our favorites :) I don't think it would be so bad to record our lives. We would be more efficient scientists, journalists--explorers of information. We could focus on the here and now instead of taking notes.
- bduerst 11y agoOr we would be stuck focusing on the best [and the worst] of past because it's persistent, like in the episode.
- djhn 11y agoReliving memories seems like a much more powerful drug when streamed directly to your retina just as you experienced it. I'm pretty sure it requires a whole other level of nostalgia to be immersed and get lost in transcribed texts of the audio of an event. Not that I'm saying the latter is what the tech will remain like, but at least at first that's what it will probably look like.
- pugio 11y agoThis story by Ted Chiang [1] is an examination of exactly the future you describe. Forget lying to others, this could prevent our leaky, revisionist, memories from lying to ourselves. [1] https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_o...
- imh 11y agoThat's terrifying. Making lying obsolete is not worth having everything I do recorded.
- zump 11y agoGood way to waste your battery.
- zardo 11y agoRelevent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163666
- noajshu 11y agoThis is awesome
- seibelj 11y agoMany speech tech startups are sued endlessly over patents [0], primarily by Nuance, and then when things look hopeless, Nuance offers to buy and make all the lawsuits go away [1]. How do you view this situation, and how will you fight the lawsuits? [0] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-over-voice-recognition-patents/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-ov... [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-patent-litigation-nuance-acquires-vlingo/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-patent-litig...
- tdaltonc 11y agoThat seems like an insane strategy. Everyone how gets acquired there must be rooting for the company (or at least the executives and management) to fail.
- seibelj 11y agoInsane? http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2008/08/nuance-slaps-zi-with-patent-infringement.html http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2008/0... List of all acquisitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Nuance_acquisitions_after_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuance_Communications#Nuance_a... In the Boston tech scene, it is pretty well-known what Nuance does and why, and is one of the primary reasons I am very against software patents, despite having several to my name.
- noajshu 11y agoWe're not familiar with the behind-the-scenes details of those cases, but we're not competing with Nuance in the transcription game. We are doing really killer audio search and view competition through that lens.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Hydraulix989 11y agoI'm pretty sure it's in their best (legal) interest to not comment at all, doing so could potentially imply that they are aware that they are infringing patents, which would be legal seppuku. EDIT: IANAL and the above is not legal advice but I have some familiarity with patent law
- sunsu 11y agoHow does this compare to http://clarify.io http://clarify.io?
- noajshu 11y agoThe idea is similar but the accuracy is much better.
- stephensonsco 11y agoThe important difference is that DeepGram is a fuzzy search that can find matches even if a text transcript is wrong. This is what ups the accuracy very significantly. I'm the other cofounder of DeepGram. I'm glad we're getting everybody's feedback!
- matiasb 11y agoLooks great! I created a simple NodeJS wrapper for it: http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX
- noajshu 11y agoAwesome, I'll take a look!
- vhiremath4 11y agoAwesome! Thank you. :-)
- matiasb 11y agoThanks!
- iofj 11y agoI have always wondered how patents and copyright apply to deep learning networks. It is pretty obvious that the NMIST deep learning convolution network uses the same algorithm patented in letter separation patents by OCR companies. And yet ... I wonder if you were to go further. Suppose you let a sufficiently deep neural network see all simpsons episodes for instance. And it manages to make new simpsons episodes. This will at some point become possible. At that point, does it count as a new work ? Does it fall under simpsons copyright ? Where is the line ?
- noajshu 11y agoI would love to see a computer-generated simpsons episode. I bet you could do a basic version using DeepDream applied to the audio and video of a different video / tv show. I imagine the voices and images would morph to sound more simpson-like.
- vhiremath4 11y agoThis is incredible. BIG ups.