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From a technology point of view, this is really cool. From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice wa

From a technology point of view, this is really cool. From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice way to say... I hate it. Or more specifically, I hate that it generates the voice, and basically enables video content spam. What we don't need more of is cheap, easy to automatically generate videos that are basically spam and/or clickbait, trying to get views. The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. The demo video even tricked me at first, I didn't realize it was a generated voice until a couple sentences in, at which point I had a visceral negative reaction, the same as when I accidently click on a content farm-generated video. It seems a major feature is automatically syncing the narration to the slides. Perhaps a way to enhance this while avoiding spam generation is to use the generated voice only for internal timing, and generated a karaoke-like display for a narrator (human) to read? As a paid service, you could even provide professional voice-offers as an add-on.

adzicg 7y ago
you can easily replace generated voice with professionally recorded voice later, and have it re-sync everything. generated voice is great for experimenting and iterating.
hobofan 7y ago
> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument. As someone that is building a tool in the roughly same space (machine voiced video generation), I can just say that the use-cases go far beyond "content-farm". It also enables a lot of useful content like e.g. internal training videos, or paired with browser automation, you can have narrated always up-to-date video manuals of your product. In the education space, it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again. And I also don't think that it will amplify the existence of such videos significantly. There are already Youtube channels that already do just that, and people don't seem to mind. E.g. there is a channel that uploads "car news" content, which basically just has a narration on top of a series of pictures of a car, and the amount of views and the rating on those videos is pretty good. In the end its just a few fact bulletins stretched into an overly long video using the same old worn out phrases (just like regular "car news"), and I don't see why a human would need to waste their time to voice that.
- gregmac 7y ago
  >> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. > If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument. The problem is getting to the end -- I don't want to spend several minutes trying to decide if it's spam or useful. It's simply easier and safer for me to use "contains auto-generated voice" as a filter to avoid watching garbage. Specifically I'm talking about videos like the ones discussed in this video [1]. Though I'd generally agree that good quality content is good quality content, I personally think there's something lost by using a machine-generated voice. Good human narrators add nuance and emphasis and energy, and it's much more interesting when someone is passionate or excited about the topic they're talking about and you can hear that come through. Some humans are bad narrators, of course, and the machine-generated voice may not be worse by comparison. The problem is I'd just rather not listen to an emotionless voice -- whether it's machine-generated or human -- read a script, I'd rather just read it myself. Maybe I'm wrong and the generated voices are much better than I've heard (any examples?) but I think part of the problem remains in that unless I'm forced to watch (eg, internal training) or have a recommendation come from someone I trust, it's still safer to filter out videos with machine-generated voice as "probably spam/garbage". > it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again I think this is a very compelling feature, but as a potential consumer of these videos (either accidentally on youtube or forced via internal training) I wish someone would come up with a way to enable this without having to resort to using the emotionless robot voice. This again could just be my personal preference: I think emotionless robot voice is pretty much going to always mean somewhere between low- and mediocre-quality video, and I also think a low quality video is significantly worse than just having an easily-updatable HTML/PDF/whatever document with pictures/screenshots/diagrams as appropriate. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4
  - mgkimsal 7y ago
    > Good human narrators add nuance and emphasis and energy, and it's much more interesting when someone is passionate or excited about the topic they're talking about and you can hear that come through. And... there are some humans tasked with making videos for others and they're just really bad. Again, internal/training videos, etc, done by people without much passion for, or even knowledge of, the task they're training you on. I prefer machine generated voice in those cases, or perhaps even some sort of subtitling that could be piped to the TTS engine of my choice.
g_langenderfer 7y ago
this is where views/rating help out.
baxtr 7y ago
Aren't these kind of videos (auto-generated) prohibited by YouTube?
- wolco 7y ago
  Only if you want to run ads.
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    that for the ads of that specific video? Or uploading a few of these would make the whole channel un-monetizable? I mean,YT now has restrictions on how much engagement you need before you start monetizing. One could use those videos to bump up the numbers, and then monetize their real videos
Avamander 7y ago
We need better reporting and labelling of farm-generated or auto-generated videos - possibly ML models that detect this. However it will cost YouTube revenue because they're profiting off of content farms. I don't see any other way to fix the problem.
tomcam 7y ago
Bear in mind that English is everyone's second-favorite language, which means that probably half its speakers don't always feel comfortable recording or public speaking. This helps them over the hump.
- pmontra 7y ago
  Definitely (example: me), but it can also apply to a native speaker of any language. Maybe s/he doesn't have a good voice, no money to spend on an actor or no time to invest on finding one or not of the same gender of the most appropriate voice for the video. Furthermore a synthetic voice makes everything faster. Also no need for a silent recording environment (again, cheaper and faster.)
adzicg 7y ago
> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. There's a big difference between good content that is automated into a video, and spam. The key use case for this was helping me focus more on the content, rather than on fiddling with synchronisation and resizing assets. I'm not a native English speaker, and although I speak at quite a few conferences per year, listening to my broken English accent (which sounds like a Bond villain) in a video is quite distracting, even for me. Even with my best efforts to record my own voice professionally, generated voice sounds a lot better than what I can do.
anomaloustho 7y ago
The primary issue I have with auto-generated video is its ability to systematically reduce accuracy over time due to being generated from out-of-date information, unmaintained APIs, or simple typos. Manual editing and manual narration tends to act as a forcing function to review the information and approve its accuracy before publishing. Auto-generated videos can often be published without a final review or fact check. As we see auto-generated video for things like product demos, and company training, it will open a new problem domain of catching “bugs” in those auto-generated videos.

adzicg 7y ago

you can easily replace generated voice with professionally recorded voice later, and have it re-sync everything. generated voice is great for experimenting and iterating.

hobofan 7y ago

> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument. As someone that is building a tool in the roughly same space (machine voiced video generation), I can just say that the use-cases go far beyond "content-farm". It also enables a lot of useful content like e.g. internal training videos, or paired with browser automation, you can have narrated always up-to-date video manuals of your product. In the education space, it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again. And I also don't think that it will amplify the existence of such videos significantly. There are already Youtube channels that already do just that, and people don't seem to mind. E.g. there is a channel that uploads "car news" content, which basically just has a narration on top of a series of pictures of a car, and the amount of views and the rating on those videos is pretty good. In the end its just a few fact bulletins stretched into an overly long video using the same old worn out phrases (just like regular "car news"), and I don't see why a human would need to waste their time to voice that.

gregmac 7y ago
>> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. > If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument. The problem is getting to the end -- I don't want to spend several minutes trying to decide if it's spam or useful. It's simply easier and safer for me to use "contains auto-generated voice" as a filter to avoid watching garbage. Specifically I'm talking about videos like the ones discussed in this video [1]. Though I'd generally agree that good quality content is good quality content, I personally think there's something lost by using a machine-generated voice. Good human narrators add nuance and emphasis and energy, and it's much more interesting when someone is passionate or excited about the topic they're talking about and you can hear that come through. Some humans are bad narrators, of course, and the machine-generated voice may not be worse by comparison. The problem is I'd just rather not listen to an emotionless voice -- whether it's machine-generated or human -- read a script, I'd rather just read it myself. Maybe I'm wrong and the generated voices are much better than I've heard (any examples?) but I think part of the problem remains in that unless I'm forced to watch (eg, internal training) or have a recommendation come from someone I trust, it's still safer to filter out videos with machine-generated voice as "probably spam/garbage". > it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again I think this is a very compelling feature, but as a potential consumer of these videos (either accidentally on youtube or forced via internal training) I wish someone would come up with a way to enable this without having to resort to using the emotionless robot voice. This again could just be my personal preference: I think emotionless robot voice is pretty much going to always mean somewhere between low- and mediocre-quality video, and I also think a low quality video is significantly worse than just having an easily-updatable HTML/PDF/whatever document with pictures/screenshots/diagrams as appropriate. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  > Good human narrators add nuance and emphasis and energy, and it's much more interesting when someone is passionate or excited about the topic they're talking about and you can hear that come through. And... there are some humans tasked with making videos for others and they're just really bad. Again, internal/training videos, etc, done by people without much passion for, or even knowledge of, the task they're training you on. I prefer machine generated voice in those cases, or perhaps even some sort of subtitling that could be piped to the TTS engine of my choice.

g_langenderfer 7y ago

this is where views/rating help out.

baxtr 7y ago

Aren't these kind of videos (auto-generated) prohibited by YouTube?

wolco 7y ago
Only if you want to run ads.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  that for the ads of that specific video? Or uploading a few of these would make the whole channel un-monetizable? I mean,YT now has restrictions on how much engagement you need before you start monetizing. One could use those videos to bump up the numbers, and then monetize their real videos

Avamander 7y ago

We need better reporting and labelling of farm-generated or auto-generated videos - possibly ML models that detect this. However it will cost YouTube revenue because they're profiting off of content farms. I don't see any other way to fix the problem.

tomcam 7y ago

Bear in mind that English is everyone's second-favorite language, which means that probably half its speakers don't always feel comfortable recording or public speaking. This helps them over the hump.

pmontra 7y ago
Definitely (example: me), but it can also apply to a native speaker of any language. Maybe s/he doesn't have a good voice, no money to spend on an actor or no time to invest on finding one or not of the same gender of the most appropriate voice for the video. Furthermore a synthetic voice makes everything faster. Also no need for a silent recording environment (again, cheaper and faster.)

adzicg 7y ago

> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm. There's a big difference between good content that is automated into a video, and spam. The key use case for this was helping me focus more on the content, rather than on fiddling with synchronisation and resizing assets. I'm not a native English speaker, and although I speak at quite a few conferences per year, listening to my broken English accent (which sounds like a Bond villain) in a video is quite distracting, even for me. Even with my best efforts to record my own voice professionally, generated voice sounds a lot better than what I can do.

anomaloustho 7y ago

The primary issue I have with auto-generated video is its ability to systematically reduce accuracy over time due to being generated from out-of-date information, unmaintained APIs, or simple typos. Manual editing and manual narration tends to act as a forcing function to review the information and approve its accuracy before publishing. Auto-generated videos can often be published without a final review or fact check. As we see auto-generated video for things like product demos, and company training, it will open a new problem domain of catching “bugs” in those auto-generated videos.