INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The boom in popularity for podcasting has given a new voice to the world of spoken word content that had been largely left for dead with the
decline of broadcast radio
Now riding the wave of that growth, a startup called Descript that’s building tools to make the art of creating podcasts — or any other
content that involves working with audio — a little easier with audio transcription and editing tools, has a trio of news announcements:
funding, an acquisition, and the launch of a new tool that brings some of the magic of natural language processing and AI to the medium by
letting people create audio of their own voices based on text that they type.Descript, the latest startup from Groupon founder Andrew Mason,
created as a spinoff of his audio-guide business Detour (which got acquired by Bose last year), is today announcing $15 million in funding,
a Series A for expanding the business (including hiring more people) that’s coming from Andreessen Horowitz (it also funded the
startup’s seed round in 2017) and Redpoint.Along with that, the company has acquired a Canadian startup, Lyrebird — which had, like
Descript, also built audio editing tools
Together, the two are rolling out a new feature for Descript called Overdub: people will now be able to create “templates” of their
voices that they can in turn use to create audio based on words that they type, part of a bigger production suite that will also let users
edit multiple voices on multiple tracks
The audio can be standalone, or the audio track for a video
(The video transcription works a little differently: when you add in words, or take them out, the video makes jumps to account for the
changes in timing.)Overdub is the latest addition to a product that lets users create instant transcriptions of audio text, which is then
has already established a following among podcasters and others that use transcription software as part of their audio production suites
The product is priced in a freemium format: no charge for up to four hours of voice content, and $10 per month after that.[gallery
ids="1883020,1883019,1883018,1883017"]In the age of fake news aided and abetted by technology, you’d be forgiven for wondering if Overdub
might not be a highway to deep fake city, where you could use the technology to create any manner of “statements” by famous voices.Mason
tells me that the company has built a way to keep that from being able to happen
To activate the editing feature, users have to first record a number of repeated-back, created on the fly and in real time, which are then
used to shape your digital voice profile
This means that you can’t, for example, feed an audio of Donald Trump into the system to create a version of the President saying that he
is awfully sorry for suggesting that building walls between the US and Mexico was a good idea, and that this would not, in fact, make
(Too bad.)But if you subscribe to the idea that tech advances in NLP and AI overall are something of a Pandora’s Box, the cat’s already
out of the bag, and even if Descript doesn’t allow for it, someone else will likely hack this kind of technology for more nefarious ends
The answer, Mason says, is to keep talking about this and making sure people understand the potentials and pitfalls.“People have already
have created the ability to make deep fakes,” Mason said
“We should expect that not everybody is going to follow the same constrants that we have followed
But part of our role is to create awareness of the possibilities
Your voice is your identity, and you need to own that voice
It’s an issue of privacy, basically.”The developments underscore the new opportunity that has opened up in tapping some of the
developments in artificial intelligence to address what is a growing market
On one hand, it’s a big market: based just on ad revenues alone, podcasting is expected to bring in some $679 million this year, and $1
billion by 2021, according to the IAB — one reason why companies like Spotify and Apple are betting big on it as a complement to their
music streaming businesses.On the other, the area of production tools for podcasters is a very crowded market, with a number of startups and
others putting out a lot of tools that all work quite well in identifying what people are saying and transcribing it accurately.On the front
of transcription and the area where Descript is working, rivals include the likes of Trint, Wreally and Otter, among many others
Decript itself doesn’t even create its basic NLP software; it uses Google’s, since basic NLP is now an area that has essentially become
“commoditized,” said Mason in an interview.That makes creating new features, tapping into AI and other advances, all the more essential,
as we look to see if one tool emerges as a clear leader in this particular area of SaaS.“In live multiuser collaboration, there is still
no other tool out there that has done what we have done with large uncompressed audio files
That is no small feat, and it has taken time to get it right,” said Mason
“I have seen this transition manifest from documents to spreadsheets to product design
No one would have thought of something like product design to be huge space but just by taking these tools for collaboration and
successfully porting them to the cloud, companies like Figma have emerged
And that’s how we got involved here.”
