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Does anyone know how the business model can work for such a product? I would expect that anyone working on scripts with voice-overs professionally would want t

Does anyone know how the business model can work for such a product? I would expect that anyone working on scripts with voice-overs professionally would want to use their favorite movie/audio editor. That means from a user perspective, a "AI Voice VST/AAX Plugin" is strictly superior to whatever cloud GUI anybody builds. (EDIT: Also, running AI as a SaaS means murf.ai needs to pay for pricey datacenter GPUs. Any user-downloadable software will have much lower operating costs.) And the big elephant in the room with speech AI is that it's so easy to copy the tech. Just like Stable Diffusion did with images, TTS developers just train on public audio from the internet, so there is no dataset moat. And arXiv is full with papers that produce pretty good results, if implemented correctly. And NVIDIA has a collection of freely downloadable TTS models with good/usable quality. To me, it seems like it's only a matter of time until someone builds a high-quality open source TTS VST plugin and then all those SaaS offerings are basically worthless. In effect, what I'm asking is: What is the competitive moat here? How can murf.ai defend against a motivated high school kid with $100k in EC2 credits?

Rastonbury 4y ago
For the segment of mom and pop store who need an explainer video or Facebook ad made in Canva and don't want to pay someone to record, they want easy of use, realism and editability/speed. My friend who runs a Shopify store asked for this. They are not going to fiddle with VST plugins or local/cloud GPUs.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Aren't they better off hiring cheap on Fiverr for someone else to do the entire video? The traditional reason against this was that you'd want your narrator to sound like a native speaker. But if AI fixes that, is there any downside to outsourcing video voice-overs to cheap labor countries?
  - Rastonbury 4y ago
    How is that better? The AI should be cheaper and the with less hassle (creating a job, reviewing freelancers, negotiating) with less risk of poor quality/reworks and disputes and yes accent is a big one. The ideal TTS product for such a person would be something like: sign up and pay > choose voice > paste text > download audio
- herbst 4y ago
  They would likely use a Produkt that also AI helps them to make the video and not 'only' TTS Like: invideo.io (no ad, just a very impressed user)
UncleEntity 4y ago
> How can murf.ai defend against a motivated high school kid with $100k in EC2 credits? Think I read somewhere you can retrain tacotron II on a new voice for something like $6 on google colab, been wanting to try it with the ScotRail voice recording dump they did a while back (just because) but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Yes. That is precisely the kind of competitive thread I would foresee for murf.ai. But how to defend against that?
mhuffman 4y ago
I am not even joking when I say that the most likely killer use for this will be YouTube/tiktok voice-over for non-native American English speakers. There is a lot of great content on the YouTube for example that could be easily monetized in the "rich" Western countries, but can be difficult to follow due to the different ways people speak the same language. This assumes that we eventually get over the uncanny valley that we are all sensitive to when it comes to voices.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Yes, but are non-native TikTok- and YouTube-ers a demographic that would pay a monthly SaaS rent? Or would they rather go with an Open Source solution? All of them are using OBS (GPL2 I think) already ;)
  - mhuffman 4y ago
    >Yes, but are non-native TikTok- and YouTube-ers a demographic that would pay a monthly SaaS rent? I think, yes, but there is a chicken-and-egg problem. I think ones that are starting to see a little youtube/tiktok income would be the most likely.
vorpalhex 4y ago
Executing a business is hard. TTS has significant processing time involved. Different users need interfaces - Grandma needs a very helpful web interface, Tech org wants an api.

Rastonbury 4y ago

For the segment of mom and pop store who need an explainer video or Facebook ad made in Canva and don't want to pay someone to record, they want easy of use, realism and editability/speed. My friend who runs a Shopify store asked for this. They are not going to fiddle with VST plugins or local/cloud GPUs.

fxtentacle 4y ago
Aren't they better off hiring cheap on Fiverr for someone else to do the entire video? The traditional reason against this was that you'd want your narrator to sound like a native speaker. But if AI fixes that, is there any downside to outsourcing video voice-overs to cheap labor countries?
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  How is that better? The AI should be cheaper and the with less hassle (creating a job, reviewing freelancers, negotiating) with less risk of poor quality/reworks and disputes and yes accent is a big one. The ideal TTS product for such a person would be something like: sign up and pay > choose voice > paste text > download audio
herbst 4y ago
They would likely use a Produkt that also AI helps them to make the video and not 'only' TTS Like: invideo.io (no ad, just a very impressed user)

UncleEntity 4y ago

> How can murf.ai defend against a motivated high school kid with $100k in EC2 credits? Think I read somewhere you can retrain tacotron II on a new voice for something like $6 on google colab, been wanting to try it with the ScotRail voice recording dump they did a while back (just because) but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

fxtentacle 4y ago
Yes. That is precisely the kind of competitive thread I would foresee for murf.ai. But how to defend against that?

mhuffman 4y ago

I am not even joking when I say that the most likely killer use for this will be YouTube/tiktok voice-over for non-native American English speakers. There is a lot of great content on the YouTube for example that could be easily monetized in the "rich" Western countries, but can be difficult to follow due to the different ways people speak the same language. This assumes that we eventually get over the uncanny valley that we are all sensitive to when it comes to voices.

fxtentacle 4y ago
Yes, but are non-native TikTok- and YouTube-ers a demographic that would pay a monthly SaaS rent? Or would they rather go with an Open Source solution? All of them are using OBS (GPL2 I think) already ;)
- mhuffman 4y ago
  >Yes, but are non-native TikTok- and YouTube-ers a demographic that would pay a monthly SaaS rent? I think, yes, but there is a chicken-and-egg problem. I think ones that are starting to see a little youtube/tiktok income would be the most likely.

vorpalhex 4y ago

Executing a business is hard. TTS has significant processing time involved. Different users need interfaces - Grandma needs a very helpful web interface, Tech org wants an api.