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Been using eleven labs for several years now. I was really impressed with their multilingual model a few years ago. Since then, they’ve released a few cheaper

Been using eleven labs for several years now. I was really impressed with their multilingual model a few years ago. Since then, they’ve released a few cheaper models, but the quality suffers greatly (they still have the old models though so it’s not an issue). They’ve also been releasing a ton of different products around TTS. I don’t mean this as a criticism — I just am curious why SOTA TTS has not improved from one model by one company several years ago, and why even said company isn’t able to improve on that model.

BoorishBears 2y ago
The biggest challenge with TTS is high quality voice data. The architectures of closed providers still mostly trace their roots to stuff like Tortoise with a few exceptions. Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional. I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users. Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.
- brookst 2y ago
  Why would you pay more than necessary to attract the voice talent you need? There aren’t (m)any businesses that pay multiples of market rates just to be nice.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    There are plenty of businesses that assign integrity a non-zero value, because most businesses reflect people. Maybe you're in a bubble devoid of that kind of thinking, so it seems very foreign or quaint. Even then it's short-sighted thinking at best: the "market rate" is not some magic self-optimizing number. Underpaying their creators is just creating the opportunity for someone to take the best of them on better terms. - Elevenlabs is also able to raise trivially in this environment: you'd think while they're still floating out here without a moat other than high quality data, they'd overpay if anything and make narrators feel like royalty until they're replaced. This isn't unlike Uber initially paying drivers massive bonuses and undercharging riders until they were able to leverage their massive network to increase prices past what the taxi providers they had decimated were charging. But in this case the marginal cost of providing the service is so low they don't even have to lose money to run a similar play, just take less of it. (in other words, even ruthless greed is not antithetical to paying these folks better)
    - brookst 2y ago
      I don’t disagree that overpaying can be a good strategy, but I question whether it has any bearing on integrity. I hire someone to paint a fence. We agree on $200 for the job and I pay them $200. We both know that it’s undifferentiated work and I could find a dozen other people who would do it for $200. Where’s the lack of integrity? Or does it just appear if I know that I actually could afford to pay them $10,000, but chose not to?
      - BoorishBears 2y ago
        We're in a market where people paint fences for $200. You're building fence painting robot and need someone to teach it how to paint fences by example. You decide you won't pay the fence painters to teach the robot upfront. Instead, painters will pay you $20 to even visit the factory. Then, if a particular painter's fence painting is especially highly rated, you'll pay them a small royalty. So you send your fence painting robot to compete with fence painters for $20 a fence, passing on a tiny slice of the $20 to the ones who helped teach it. - We can consider the creation of fence robot and the competition with the existing market just another piece of the steady march of progress, but there's still obvious room to act with more integrity in this situation. There was no established rate for what fair wages to teach the robot to paint were, and you can't pay $200 because you don't charge $200... but it's also probably not "-$22/month + 1% royalties".
- limo11 2y ago
  Rev share is up to 20% on default rates (depending on notice period). With custom rates they can make their voice more expensive and earn up to $0.2 for every 1000 characters. So you can do the math.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    The math is you're paying a pittance considering the insane margins involved and the fact you're using their voices in a flywheel that's actively obsoleting them. Edit: And since you're concerned we might not be aware of Elevenlabs' generous terms... why is your documentation so cagey about them? https://elevenlabs.io/docs/product-guides/voices/payouts#things-to-know https://elevenlabs.io/docs/product-guides/voices/payouts#thi... I see users need to keep paying you a subscription fee in order to even get their payouts... but "up to 20%" isn't saying particularly much without the kind of details that should probably be on that page. - Considering how much your company owes to an open source model, it's also impressive how little you've returned to the commons. But no worries, the top comment under this post is an open source model that was finetuned for a couple of thousand dollars by a single dude soliciting the public for random voice samples. If Google has no moat, you're out to sea.

BoorishBears 2y ago

The biggest challenge with TTS is high quality voice data. The architectures of closed providers still mostly trace their roots to stuff like Tortoise with a few exceptions. Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional. I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users. Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.

brookst 2y ago
Why would you pay more than necessary to attract the voice talent you need? There aren’t (m)any businesses that pay multiples of market rates just to be nice.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  There are plenty of businesses that assign integrity a non-zero value, because most businesses reflect people. Maybe you're in a bubble devoid of that kind of thinking, so it seems very foreign or quaint. Even then it's short-sighted thinking at best: the "market rate" is not some magic self-optimizing number. Underpaying their creators is just creating the opportunity for someone to take the best of them on better terms. - Elevenlabs is also able to raise trivially in this environment: you'd think while they're still floating out here without a moat other than high quality data, they'd overpay if anything and make narrators feel like royalty until they're replaced. This isn't unlike Uber initially paying drivers massive bonuses and undercharging riders until they were able to leverage their massive network to increase prices past what the taxi providers they had decimated were charging. But in this case the marginal cost of providing the service is so low they don't even have to lose money to run a similar play, just take less of it. (in other words, even ruthless greed is not antithetical to paying these folks better)
  - brookst 2y ago
    I don’t disagree that overpaying can be a good strategy, but I question whether it has any bearing on integrity. I hire someone to paint a fence. We agree on $200 for the job and I pay them $200. We both know that it’s undifferentiated work and I could find a dozen other people who would do it for $200. Where’s the lack of integrity? Or does it just appear if I know that I actually could afford to pay them $10,000, but chose not to?
    - BoorishBears 2y ago
      We're in a market where people paint fences for $200. You're building fence painting robot and need someone to teach it how to paint fences by example. You decide you won't pay the fence painters to teach the robot upfront. Instead, painters will pay you $20 to even visit the factory. Then, if a particular painter's fence painting is especially highly rated, you'll pay them a small royalty. So you send your fence painting robot to compete with fence painters for $20 a fence, passing on a tiny slice of the $20 to the ones who helped teach it. - We can consider the creation of fence robot and the competition with the existing market just another piece of the steady march of progress, but there's still obvious room to act with more integrity in this situation. There was no established rate for what fair wages to teach the robot to paint were, and you can't pay $200 because you don't charge $200... but it's also probably not "-$22/month + 1% royalties".
limo11 2y ago
Rev share is up to 20% on default rates (depending on notice period). With custom rates they can make their voice more expensive and earn up to $0.2 for every 1000 characters. So you can do the math.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  The math is you're paying a pittance considering the insane margins involved and the fact you're using their voices in a flywheel that's actively obsoleting them. Edit: And since you're concerned we might not be aware of Elevenlabs' generous terms... why is your documentation so cagey about them? https://elevenlabs.io/docs/product-guides/voices/payouts#things-to-know https://elevenlabs.io/docs/product-guides/voices/payouts#thi... I see users need to keep paying you a subscription fee in order to even get their payouts... but "up to 20%" isn't saying particularly much without the kind of details that should probably be on that page. - Considering how much your company owes to an open source model, it's also impressive how little you've returned to the commons. But no worries, the top comment under this post is an open source model that was finetuned for a couple of thousand dollars by a single dude soliciting the public for random voice samples. If Google has no moat, you're out to sea.