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This is about as manipulative as it gets. What's the angle other than "haha we tricked you into thinking we were actually personally invested in this pitch"? R

This is about as manipulative as it gets. What's the angle other than "haha we tricked you into thinking we were actually personally invested in this pitch"? Right in your description you say: > [People] want to see you, see that you are real, they want to hear your voice. Yet that's exactly what this product takes away.

hassaanr 5y ago
Totally understand this perspective. The end goal is to provide more immersive product experiences beyond just sales. Use cases that wouldn’t be able to have a personal touch at all because of the scalability issue of making individual videos. Sales unfortunately does have unsavory aspects to it that we at HN especially dislike
cma 5y ago
Are maketing fliers allowed to use fonts that look scuffy--like from an old typesetting machine--even if they were put together on a computer? Maketing materials are always in an arms race, a new graphic design trend comes out that takes a lot of work and becomes a quality/investment signal, then people figure out how to automate it and it suddenly looks passe.
- hassaanr 5y ago
  Totally agree. The thought is that this is the next evolution of mailmerge. A different way to consume the same content!
burkaman 5y ago
I've been tricked in the past by a very convincing "personalized" recruiting email that I later realized was auto-generated. It gave me an incredibly negative impression of the company and the product, and I've told the story to a lot of people and never met anyone that likes the idea. So the only way for this company to succeed is if their videos are so good that the targets never realize they're fake. I'm no entrepreneur, but it doesn't seem ideal if your business model is literally based on lies. Not to mention, if the technology is that good, then it will be trivial to abuse this for corporate espionage, phishing, blackmail, slander, etc. Sure, if they don't do it, someone else will, but that's never been a valid excuse.
- hassaanr 5y ago
  Oof sorry to hear you had that experience. Not everyone wants generated content and that totally makes sense. To us this is the next evolution to something like MailChimp or as another commenter mentioned- handwriting style fonts in marketing material. As for abuse- we are heavily focused on making sure our platform is not abused. There are multiple checks in place to make sure only you can generate videos with your voice/face.
  - burkaman 5y ago
    I mean, fake realistic handwriting fonts are universally hated, otherwise you'd see people using them for wedding thank you notes or other legitimate purposes. I've only seen them used in extended car warranty scams and similar. And I'm sure you've thought about the abuse potential and you're doing what you can, but what's going to happen when accounts get hacked? Companies already have to train their employees to be wary of emails impersonating their CEO ("please wire me $10,000 immediately for a high profile account"), and it's going to be much harder to train everyone to mistrust video or even live video calls if Tavus works quickly. I guess it's inevitable, but again, you don't have to be the ones to bring that future to life.
    - hassaanr 5y ago
      These are all good points. Do you see use cases that you’d personally find useful? For example we’re working with a telehealth company to provide weekly/monthly health updates that they otherwise would send through emails and people would ignore. I’m personally more interested in these product use cases than sales/marketing. This is also why we require set templates that limit what you can change. We are also working on the flip side of this problem. In addition to building this platform Tavus is also building detection tools as we continue to explore what disclosure should be required on these videos. I know in that sense we’re both fire fighters and seem like we’re arsonist. However we’re really focused on providing a tool that builds immersive experiences while also fighting bad actors from other platforms that precede us/will come after us.

hassaanr 5y ago

Totally understand this perspective. The end goal is to provide more immersive product experiences beyond just sales. Use cases that wouldn’t be able to have a personal touch at all because of the scalability issue of making individual videos. Sales unfortunately does have unsavory aspects to it that we at HN especially dislike

cma 5y ago

Are maketing fliers allowed to use fonts that look scuffy--like from an old typesetting machine--even if they were put together on a computer? Maketing materials are always in an arms race, a new graphic design trend comes out that takes a lot of work and becomes a quality/investment signal, then people figure out how to automate it and it suddenly looks passe.

hassaanr 5y ago
Totally agree. The thought is that this is the next evolution of mailmerge. A different way to consume the same content!

burkaman 5y ago

I've been tricked in the past by a very convincing "personalized" recruiting email that I later realized was auto-generated. It gave me an incredibly negative impression of the company and the product, and I've told the story to a lot of people and never met anyone that likes the idea. So the only way for this company to succeed is if their videos are so good that the targets never realize they're fake. I'm no entrepreneur, but it doesn't seem ideal if your business model is literally based on lies. Not to mention, if the technology is that good, then it will be trivial to abuse this for corporate espionage, phishing, blackmail, slander, etc. Sure, if they don't do it, someone else will, but that's never been a valid excuse.

hassaanr 5y ago
Oof sorry to hear you had that experience. Not everyone wants generated content and that totally makes sense. To us this is the next evolution to something like MailChimp or as another commenter mentioned- handwriting style fonts in marketing material. As for abuse- we are heavily focused on making sure our platform is not abused. There are multiple checks in place to make sure only you can generate videos with your voice/face.
- burkaman 5y ago
  I mean, fake realistic handwriting fonts are universally hated, otherwise you'd see people using them for wedding thank you notes or other legitimate purposes. I've only seen them used in extended car warranty scams and similar. And I'm sure you've thought about the abuse potential and you're doing what you can, but what's going to happen when accounts get hacked? Companies already have to train their employees to be wary of emails impersonating their CEO ("please wire me $10,000 immediately for a high profile account"), and it's going to be much harder to train everyone to mistrust video or even live video calls if Tavus works quickly. I guess it's inevitable, but again, you don't have to be the ones to bring that future to life.
  - hassaanr 5y ago
    These are all good points. Do you see use cases that you’d personally find useful? For example we’re working with a telehealth company to provide weekly/monthly health updates that they otherwise would send through emails and people would ignore. I’m personally more interested in these product use cases than sales/marketing. This is also why we require set templates that limit what you can change. We are also working on the flip side of this problem. In addition to building this platform Tavus is also building detection tools as we continue to explore what disclosure should be required on these videos. I know in that sense we’re both fire fighters and seem like we’re arsonist. However we’re really focused on providing a tool that builds immersive experiences while also fighting bad actors from other platforms that precede us/will come after us.