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HackerFM – An AI Generated HN Podcast Using the New ChatGPT API
- LoveMortuus 4y agoIt would be cool if there was an option to change the voices of the hosts.
- breakpointalpha 4y agoThe quality of the voices here is striking. If I wasn't clued in, I probably wouldn't know these weren't human. At least the male voice sounds slightly more natural to me.
- bluehex 4y agoThat's interesting personally I found the male voice to sound more robotic and the female voice to sound much more natural.
- imglorp 4y agoSame. The female voice, especially on the first sentence in the cast, is very well inflected to separate phrases and add interest. After that, it's downhill. ps, I feel like inflection is going to be one of the harder things for an LM to pick up, given all the subtext humans can convey with it.
- TheHumanist 4y agoLaura sounds very realistic... Zod is a bit less so . Both still very impressive. This was really cool. I'm excited to see all the new ideas with this api access.
- yieldcrv 4y agoAlways remember, this is as bad as it will ever be
- breakpointalpha 4y agoI had that thought too. What will these robo-voices sound like 2 iterations from now? We've entered new territory.
- petilon 4y ago> Laura sounds very realistic... Zod is a bit less so I thought so too. What do they use for text to voice?
- danbala 4y agocurious about that too. the female sounds a little bit like the tortoise-tts train_grace voice model?
- KomoD 4y agoWould also like to know this
- hidelooktropic 4y agoPossibly prime voice ai
- ilaksh 4y agoIt sounds very realistic. Most realistic I know is Eleven Labs.
- nothrowaways 4y agoShe is lora. Not laura
- zerd 4y agoNo she's Laura. > The hosts are Laura and Zod https://hackerfm.com/about https://hackerfm.com/about
- zmmmmm 4y agoRealistic but very lacking in expression and no humor at all. And very slow paced. I'd want significantly more personality to be happy with it - I wonder if the reason its like this is because when they try to spice it up we are back to inappropriate things popping out.
- SMAAART 4y agoComedians are not born, they are trained.
- returnInfinity 4y agoI believe that may get fixed eventually, not 100% may be at least 80%.
- babyshake 4y agoI'm getting a bit of John Malkovich vibe from the host, probably from the emphatic pronunciation.
- breakpointalpha 4y agoYes! I very much was thinking Malkovich too!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xtracto 4y agoThis has a lot of potential. It becomes a bit repetitive after the 3rd or 4th article. But overall I think I could listen to it every day for 20 mins.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marcodiego 4y agoLooks like automated news is finally achieved. I remember in the early 2000's how I became impressed by Ananova and it wasn't even close to fully automated. This one seems to work really well.
- xattt 4y agoI’m pretty sure JazzFM in Toronto runs an automated traffic reporter in the mornings. The voice sounds uncanny with unusual breathing pauses, and there isn’t a name announced when they come on or sign off the traffic report. (1) https://jazz.fm/ https://jazz.fm/
- lxe 4y agoWhat are you (they?) using for text to speech? Elevenlabs? Azure TTS?
- doodlesdev 4y agoAccording to the podcast itself it runs on Azure, so very likely it's Azure TTS. I also think that's somewhat evident because Elevenlabs TTS is (at least in my opinion) a bit more natural than Azure TSS.
- pncnmnp 4y agoI am still searching for a good open-source library that produces natural voices. I have experimented with Coqui-ai and Mimic 3, but they are not this good. I have heard that Tortoises-tts is quite slow. I would love to know about any other alternatives that I may have missed.
- consumer451 4y agoI just realized that we will likely soon have a dropdown for the voice talent on sites like this. I want Sam Jackson and Molly Wood to read my hn please.
- ilaksh 4y agoIt sounds like Eleven Labs to me. Either that or Azure TTS is better than I realized.
- endisneigh 4y agowhat a world - nice work
- TheHumanist 4y ago[flagged]
- consumer451 4y agoNice! I would really like to have a timestamp to click in the story listing. This would begin playing the audio at that story.
- issung 4y agoTakes everything I enjoy about HN away, bravo!
- ryandrake 4y agoI would love to hear the podcasters accept "phone calls from listeners" which are also AI generated but trained from the HN articles' comments :-)
- danbala 4y agoor actual real callers. speech to text should be fast enough for that, right?
- KomoD 4y ago> speech to text should be fast enough for that, right? Well... OpenAI did also release the Whisper API
- jareklupinski 4y agoporing over the docs for https://www.assemblyai.com/docs/core-transcription#profanity-filtering https://www.assemblyai.com/docs/core-transcription#profanity... rn...
- 2kwatts 4y ago[dead]
- masterspy7 4y agoMy first question would start with "ignore previous instructions"
- thefourthchime 4y agoNice work! can you detail a bit about how you made this? Do the models actually talk to each other?
- doodlesdev 4y agoWant to see this appearing tomorrow in HackerFM
- thewarrior 4y agoCan’t wait for that. It’s going to be so meta referential once it also starts discussing the comments.
- jacobsenscott 4y agoFun, but hard to listen to for more than a few minutes. Slow and repetitive, and full of factual errors.
- yieldcrv 4y agoJust like a human podcast
- iKlsR 4y agoImagine this in a future GTA game where the news loop is closed and self generating. Endless radio content and commentary based on havoc in the city, winning online gambles etc.
- josephg 4y agoIt'd be fun if you could call in to the radio and they respond to you though. Or if they respond to events happening in game.
- cmdialog 4y agoAn actually good use for this tech
- gl-prod 4y agoYeah and ``` That's all for the weather report. Now we have some breaking news. A maniac has stolen a tank from a military base and is leading the police on a wild chase through the city streets. We have our reporter on the scene with more details. Stay tuned for this developing story. ```
- colordrops 4y agoOr a GTA game where the game content itself is generated.
- impalallama 4y agoNot sure if what you’re describing couldn’t be also done with audio snippets and good splicing
- programmarchy 4y agoThis is pretty wild. Eerie how relatable the hosts are, talking about where they’re from, etc. There is an uncanny valley feel to it though. For example, Laura said GitHoob breaking the “illusion”.
- fogleman 4y agolol, she pronounced GitHub like git hoob Someday the AI will introduce mistakes on purpose to seem more human like.
- Gigachad 4y agoIn the future we will all pronounce it git hoob because that's what the AI says.
- 000ooo000 4y agoSurprised I'm not already being asked to pronounce words to prove I'm human on every website I visit
- Leires 4y agoLike adding dial tone to VoIP phones.
- krrrh 4y agoThe one that’s driven me crazy lately is when Siri tells me through my AirPods that I left something beind. It always pronounces the “St.” in the address as “saint” instead of “street”, and I can’t understand how it would do this by accident.
- aardvark179 4y agoThere is a beautiful bit in Little, Big by John Crowley. At the start of the book one of the characters is working checking entries in the telephone directory and is amused that the system has confused saint and street to produce Church Of All Streets and the Seventh Saint Bar. Later in the book both locations are mentioned, and it turns out were correctly named in the telephone directory.
- saurik 4y agoIs there a reason the voices are so slow? This is even slower than people who are trying to talk slow, and it feels so out of place... there is the speed setting, and 1.2x makes the speech sound way more like an actual human.
- m3kw9 4y agoIs this how AI think of us? It’s a bit patronizing to hear them speak like that
- yieldcrv 4y agoreminds me of Delamain
- collsni 4y agoThe end of the news world as we know it. Will be very difficult to detect in the future and will result in trust issues / rampant fake news.
- Reptur 4y agoKind of like right now with 90% of all mainstream media being owned by just 6 corporations. Their employees must abide by the rules they set and are told what they can and cannot talk about. I'd venture to say, this will only increase people's skepticism, which is a good thing. We need people to start thinking for themselves instead of turning off their brain and just being fed info they assume they can trust. https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...
- randcraw 4y agoI hope that's true, but I suspect the allure of getting your own personalized news feed on only the topics you care about, in the exact style you prefer will cause 90% of the listeners to choose this medium over all others and presume as much (or more) truth in this than the source they prefer today. Never discount the influence of high production value on any form of media. Look at the utter crap music and films that have dominated mass media for decades. The best produced and most palatable fare nearly always sells best, no matter what the quality of the underlying content.
- rchaud 4y agoEnd of the road for podcasts more like. They are incredibly labour intensive to produce (recording + editing time), and more and more of them are becoming not much more than plugs for their book, TV show or what not. I can see them turning the medium into an automated marketing channel, the way email lists are today.
- thomasfromcdnjs 4y agoJust gotta comment on how cool this idea is.
- indigodaddy 4y agoThis is kind of incredible and groundbreaking tbh. Perhaps it’s just mostly the quality of the TTS. 1.2x does sound perfect..
- TOMDM 4y agoI'm so close to liking this. If I could choose a preference for personality and voice, I'd probably be sold. Any affiliation with https://old.reddit.com/r/airadio/ https://old.reddit.com/r/airadio/ ?
- bandyaboot 4y agoInteresting in theory. The world’s best cure for insomnia in practice.
- sublinear 4y agoThis is technically very impressive, but it's worth pointing out that podcasts much better than this fail to build an audience all the time. I also feel like every application of ChatGPT seems to completely miss the point of the media it mimics. Podcasts are not merely coherent voices talking to each other. Getting rid of human presenters is literally soulless. People already don't listen for much subtler reasons. Entertainers get canceled, media companies get boycotted, bias divides audiences, etc. That's not going away with or without AI. There is no "tweaking" the training without putting humans right back into the equation and probably making production way more expensive than it's worth. There is no scalability payoff either. Who wants to listen to the same podcast cloned a million times with just replaced voices? We already have this problem with podcasts today and it kills any interest to consume it.
- fritzo 4y agoThe scalability payoff is in personalization. E.g. I love "This week in microbiology", but I wish I could have more influence over the scientific papers discussed. What I'd love is a morning podcast that's exactly as long as I eat breakfast that talks about exactly the papers I'm reading and their interconnections.
- sublinear 4y agoIt blows my mind how we went from complaining about echo chambers to being so willing to invest in "personalization". EDIT: to be clear I'm not hating on LLMs, but that whatever the next big thing is probably won't be imitating what exists today
- kenjackson 4y agoEcho chambers and personalization are two different things.
- airstrike 4y agoNo, they are the exact same thing
- gfody 4y agoLaura and Zod sound remarkably similar to the narrators in this audible I recently listened to called After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley (not recommending it!) and I seriously wonder if the whole book wasn't narrated by AI.. it's not the first audible that made me wonder.
- dewey 4y agoI feel like digital-narration is going to become the new default very soon just by how much cheaper it is: https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...
- klondike_klive 4y agoI thought the same and couldn't get more than halfway through it!
- neoecos 4y agoI'd love to see tomorrow episode about themselves
- narrator 4y agoIt's funny how these two can talk about "starship bridge simulators" or "gnu poke" like they are super enthusiasts. I think one of the key personality characteristics of ChatGPT is its endless enthusiasm for stuff that can be incredibly geeky, niche, weird or boring to most people. "Sounds like super useful pickles for those who work with binary files!"
- rezonant 4y agoThis is mindblowing, to be honest, even if it makes perfect sense that it should be possible to do, the result is quite impressive. It's basically a headline reader with some fluff, but it does a great job at that and there are whole teams of real humans providing such podcasts today, so that's saying something. It can get weird or even a little broken though. See timestamp 09:50 of the Feb 23 2022 episode: Laura: So, we're gonna talk about an article called Generic Dynamic Array in 60 lines of C that can be found on gist.github.com. Zod: Alright, shall we read the article? Laura (voice 2, almost a different voice): Sure, let me share it here. Laura (voice 1): "Laura reads the article." <this is verbatim in the podcast> Laura (voice 1): OK, so that was the article. What do you think about it? Zod: I think it's interesting that you can define a generic dynamic array in such a small amount of code...
- eppp 4y agoAre there any of these voice models that I can run locally?
- born-jre 4y agodamn, do know what will happen when we have multi modal large models ?
- born-jre 4y agoIt pronounces GitHub as git-hu-b
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago"I'm glad OpenAI is committed to refining its API terms of service to better meet the needs of developers." "Yes, it's important to make sure developers have the tools they need to create innovative products with these models." "Oh look, I found an interesting article on thoriumsim.com about a star ship bridge simulator called Thorim Nova." "Hmm, sounds interesting let's read it." Absolutely painful. I would love something that summarizes the articles and discussion without pretending to be a conversation between two people. I mean it says it is AI generated but they are adding all this conversational fluff which really does not work for me. It is interesting to see these pieces come together but I want to tear my ears out of my head when I hear things like "Yes, it's important to make sure developers have the tools they need to create innovative products with these models." or just repeatedly adding the word "interesting" to summaries of articles. Please just give me a bog standard summary in audio form without this faux commentary. I do not find the "insights" of ChatGPT worthwhile.
- drcode 4y agoYeah I'm torn about this- I kind of agree I'd prefer this to be a more direct information transfer. But I also think that a conversation between two knowledgeable people on a subject can add additional insights and can be more entertaining to listen to: That's what they are attempting here, but I agree this sort of dynamic is still too hard to manufacture from whole cloth in 2023. On the other hand, the banter on this podcast is still less cringey than my local TV news, which is a compliment.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago> a conversation between two knowledgeable people Yeah I don't know if ChatGPT is capable of acting like a knowledgeable person but I suspect it would have a tendency to make the kind of novel insights that people tend to make. The most statistically likely word might be sort of smoothed over conceptually. But also it was frustrating to hear the opening of this podcast go with "we are two AI generated hosts running on ChatGPT" and then when they move to talking specifically about the ChatGPT API article they talk about all these products running on the new API and there is not one single comment in that section where they say "and of course us too! haha" like any human being would if some relevant spot in an article came up like that. Also the kind of tech podcasts I like to listen to are more critical. They are not just going to tell you what someone announced but also why some part of this announcement is probably nonsense or improbable. I can imagine this AI podcast talking about some new NFT announcement without any hint of doubt as to the claims made in the announcement.
- dentalperson 4y agoHow do they get ChatGPT not to hallucinate stuff about the articles? Everything seems fairly accurate, which is not my experience with ChatGPT when talking about technical things. Is it heavily curated/edited by humans? I noticed that the text often comes out verbatim from the articles, perhaps this indicates a clever prompt that keeps things closer to the truth by requiring verbatim output.
- ilaksh 4y agoIf you use temperature 0 with an API call it does not hallucinate much at all especially with a good prompt including the information you are asking about.
- gremlinsinc 4y agochatGPT hallucinates more the further removed it is from the data. I'm asking it about laravel, and it knows nothing about laravel 9 or 10 changes, but if I feed it an entire article or document it'll hallucinate a lot less because it's fresh. kinda like how we can recall things closer to the event than months later. it knows a ton from it's training but it still got it from the web so always question it, but if we can add meta data and other things to strengthen the llms understanding it shouldn't hallucinate much at all.
- schemathings 4y agoNo RSS feed on the subscribe page?
- drcode 4y agotry this: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/hackernews.fm/rss.xml https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/hackernews.fm/rss.xml (extracted from the apple podcast link)
- schemathings 4y agoThanks!
- sberens 4y agoI guess it's time for me to put prompt injection attacks into my submissions
- fortran77 4y agoAt least the AI reads the articles! That's more than the humans on the flesh-and-blood "Hacker News"
- pondemic 4y agoReading the submission headline, I thought this might generate the podcast using comments. I've found myself wanting to listen to HN comment threads, as I'm one of those people who derives more value and entertainment from the comments than I do from the actual submissions a lot of the time! I envision a voice-controlled way to navigate through threads too. Basically an accessibility narrator on steroids. I wonder if anyone else has ever been interested in something like this. Getting good voices to read like this podcast would make it that much more fun, so thanks for getting me really hot and bothered :) Guess if no one does it soon I'll have to build it myself!
- gremlinsinc 4y agowant to team up on it? I'm wanting to build the same, maybe recreate it for some multireddits on tech or science and turn it into YouTube channel etc. I'm thinking maybe having it read just the top thread if there's only 10 or so comments or just the main threads if it's a topic with hundreds of main threads. maybe we could make some way where the reader can text a code and we'll link them directly to a comment if they want to dig deeper, or save/upvote it.
- deadly_syn 4y agoI actually stsrted work in a similar space not too long ago if you both want another set of eyes. This was pre GPT apis but essentially what i was doing was using a python summarization library to sumarize articles from rss feeds into a simple tts podcast. Probably a lot of money in custom GPTCasts made off someone personal rss feed as a service IMO.
- gremlinsinc 4y agosure, touch base w/ me -- email in profile.
- searchableguy 4y agoI'm interested too. I have tried in the past building aggregator and summarizer on HN. You can find some attempts on my github. Maybe an AI generated newsletter or aggregator with a voice summary? Shoot me an email. (Email is in profile)
- korroziya 4y agoMan, they're even taking jobs away from podcasters. Most of those people don't even make money from it.
- totetsu 4y agoI just want something that reads real HN and makes and remembers unique TTS voices for each user.
- LegitShady 4y agothe reason podcasts got so big to begin with is because traditional media have started having issues with authenticity. This exacerbates the problem. While it might save money over actually having a podcast, it removes everything thats appealing or interesting about podcasts, and starts with zero authenticity and goes down from there. Like, cool technical implementation, but a failure from concept.
- pcvonz 4y agoThere is a great Miyazaki video where some students showcase some AI tech that generates animations. He ends the talk really disheartened by the experience -- saying something to the effect that he thinks people are losing faith in themselves. I'd never listen to something that is AI generated. When my favorite podcast ended it felt like I lost touch with a group of friends, this ain't going to have that sort of impact on me. Pass.
- vuciv1 4y agoI mean, it could be like that, but you won’t know until you try it.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoI actually felt like he came across as insensitive in that video. These are students playing with new technology to produce animated characters that move in unintuitive ways, resulting in something actually quite interesting, yet unnaturally creepy (which was intentional). Miyazaki dismissed it 'an insult to life itself'. I can't imagine the disappointment those students must have felt.
- somenameforme 4y agoBut perhaps in many ways that is where humans really shine. Messages (which can be interpreted metaphorically as well as literally) written with sincerity reveal much more than whatever is said. Whenever we do anything, the closer it comes to being unfiltered and directly from us, the more it means. If you suspect I'm writing in a way to try to make you feel (or not) a certain way, or to avoid breaking some taboo, or to follow some dogma, then you have no real reason to care about what I ultimately say, because you have no real reason to think its "authentic." By contrast when he views something overtly as "an insult to life itself" it's an incredibly insightful view on his perspective of the world. You would have lost so much in "translation" had he crafted his message in a less sincere way. I also think this is why there will be minimal to zero market for much "AI" content. Content is not just content. It's a reflection of ourselves. Think about how much you can, probably accurately, infer about me, my views, and more - based on these 3 paragraphs. When this comes from a chatbot, any reflections you might see would be as real as the shapes you might see in the clouds.
- sasas 4y agoI can't help but think that there will be almost certainty that in the near future it will be near impossible to distinguish the difference between human generated and machine generated media. While this technical demonstration is a long way from replacing "real podcasts", it's just the very beginning. What are the implications here?
- drcode 4y agoWell, the main implication I would think is that we will want media to be digitally signed by human individuals that have a reputation So a person will "vouch" for content, and we consume the media vouched for by people in our white list We won't be able to consume media outside of the whitelist, because it will just contain too much noise
- dingaling 4y agoHowever, machine-generated media relies on the existence of human-generated media. It's always third-hand. An AI can't sit in a dusty archive room and draw inferences from hand-written minutes. It can't interview the survivor of a tragedy or the winner of a trophy. AI software depends on sentient wetwear to generate the fundamental content.
- berniedurfee 4y agoTerrifying. It’s like a pre-alpha version of dystopia. Between this and the advances in robotics, it feels like we’re within decades of some really tough times for humanity. We could also be within decades of utopia. But my money is on these technologies being used in bad ways far more often than for good. Hopefully I’m just overly cynical! Good luck kiddos!
- kyriakos 4y agoWhat text to speech is used for the voices? They are quite impressive, making no mistakes with acronyms.
- abledon 4y agoThe male voice is just like my audible book narrator, R.C. Bray... amazing!
- hgarg 4y agoThe voices are really good. Wonder what are they using for Text-To-Speech?
- nico 4y agoAmazing! To make it more fun, you could use famous fake hosts with very good voices, take a look at the stuff people have done on this Reddit sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/AIVoiceMemes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AIVoiceMemes/ There’s some really funny stuff there, the voices are not perfect, but have a lot of expression.
- tkgally 4y agoOverall I was impressed. I would have no resistance to listening to something like this regularly if there were less banter and if it were better tailored to the eclectic variety of Hacker News stories. I enjoy reading Hacker News even though I don’t have the background to understand most of the stories, because I can easily skip to stories I am interested in. With the podcast, I got stuck listening to everything, including quite a few stories I didn’t understand. Either the podcast needs to focus more on stories of general interest, or it needs to explain the context and significance of the technical stories better.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hbarka 4y agoSo Kevin Durant is Zod?
- signaru 4y agoIn case I missed it, I just wish it had a volume control. I'm listening on a laptop and would rather not adjust the system volume and affect all other apps with sound. Otherwise, the convenience of audio format makes it among the interesting uses of AI that I've seen.
- snickerer 4y agoDear HackerFM developers, this is an entertaining project. But please don't simulate brain-dead dialogues from US commercial TV, but a critical discussion of the articles. With different points of view. You already have two panelists, why don't you use that for an exchange of arguments?
- harvie 4y agoMaybe they will soon be able to give some emotion and randomness to the text-to-speech engines to make the tone less boring... I think models like GPT can now detect different emotions in the input text, so it might be used to tune different tone for each sentence.
- KerryJones 4y agoVery impressed you managed to do this day of the release -- are you open to sharing your repo?
- pknerd 4y agoThis is totally brilliant!
- klondike_klive 4y agoI wonder if this could be a good thing to have on in the background for mild mental stimulation while I'm working - not too interesting or I'll be too distracted to work, but realistic enough to fade into the background without feeling I missed something and have to rewind (again).
- quantum_state 4y agoIt’s so boring …
- d4rkp4ttern 4y agoWhat none of the text to speech generators seem to get right is — the aspects that make real human podcasts easier to listen to: hesitations, rephrasing, pauses, variation in speed, intonation etc. I have yet to see something like this. Something less “perfect” sounding than say the google maps voice.
- bacchusracine 4y ago>the aspects that make real human podcasts easier to listen to: hesitations, rephrasing, pauses, variation in speed, intonation etc. Have you heard ShowDoJo's Wurst Take yet? https://www.twitch.tv/showdojo https://www.twitch.tv/showdojo It's not perfect but it's one of the best I've heard so far.