People like podcasts, because they are interesting stories told by humans. Good podcasts have a lot of creativity behind them. Your HN Recap podcast uses a bland voice that sometimes struggles with tech terms, and the auto-generated summaries often feature deep details and miss the intention of the story. Auto-generated content on YouTube is usually misleading spam, how will you prevent your auto-generated podcasts from flooding podcast aggregators with such content?
Some people like those, some of the time. I too enjoy a good Conan or Hardcore History podcast but many other podcasts I listen to are basically audiobooks where, if the voice is good enough, I'll listen to them. History of Rome is a prime example, it's essentially a very long audiobook where the reading voice makes nearly no difference to me.
We highlight that the creativity comes from the human. The text to speech is the AI Component. There is a script assistant that can help you adjust the tone of the text, but the creativity always comes from human.
Hm, based on their site it looks like it's more of an editor where you type content that's then converted to speech, there's nothing in there that necessitates that the content be AI generated. Seems to me more of a competitor to https://www.descript.com/ than anything.
In fact, the voice narrating Hardcore History is so.. American (no offense to anyone), swapping in another voice would actually be an improvement for me.
In relation to HN Recap, I agree that it struggles with terms, but I’d argue that the results show that the stories are captured well.
I get your point on people liking authentic stories from people and that’s the value of podcasts. There’s many different formats of podcasts and interviews/conversations are just 20% of overall podcasts. I agree with you that for the time being those formats are best done person to person. But for all other podcasts (e.g news rundowns, narrations etc), podcasts generated on Wondercraft on a daily basis are proving that as long as human creativity is there podcasts created using TTS and other AI tools can be very engaging and appealing for many. That is ultimately how the flooding of such content is regulated as well, people will only listen to content that has thought behind it so creators will not find much value in “auto generated” podcasts.
1. Vim Boss - the auto-generated description fails to mention the post author is a top Neovim contributor. It is hard to tell who Bram is just from the description. It also said “the deceased iconic software Vim” (Vim is not dead…) The music feels inappropriate.
2. The Future of the Vim Project - “In an exciting movement towards the next stage of Vim project’s evolution”? What is exciting about having to deal with Bram’s death? Why would listeners care about FTP servers and websites? What does “in a paradoxical fusion of continuity and change” mean? A human would have made a segue between the two, but the robot couldn’t.
3. MS Teams channels cannot contain MS-DOS device names - “sailing through the sea of digital collaboration”? Why did it start with buzzword bingo? Why would anyone care about specific numbers re the Teams limitations? What are MSD-OS device names? (Bad pronunciation aside, a human would have provided some examples, considering they’re mentioned in the article title.) The AI summary doesn’t match the post title and what the comments focused on.
4. My Overkill Home Network - what value is there in naming all the random components in the author’s network? That’s a word salad that is difficult to parse and listen to.
The AI butchered four out of ten stories, and it didn’t do a great job of respecting a deceased person (it felt so happy about the changes in Vim). I’d rather not listen to it do world news.
PS. your podcast needs a transcript. And the last sentence felt cut off.
Thank you for taking the time to go through this. I agree that there is room for improvement and your comment makes it clear what we can improve. But I disagree with the sentiment that it does not add value. There are 1k people that tune in daily to listen to this that would agree with me: https://op3.dev/show/f77aea62-97e5-5cce-92c6-9464e51c30c6
Definitely will add transcript. The HN Recap has been a side thing for us while we have been building the Podcast Creation platform, but we will do better.
