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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

I've been tricked in the past by a very convincing "personalized" recruiting email that I later realized was auto-generated. It gave me an incredibly negative impression of the company and the product, and I've told the story to a lot of people and never met anyone that likes the idea.

So the only way for this company to succeed is if their videos are so good that the targets never realize they're fake. I'm no entrepreneur, but it doesn't seem ideal if your business model is literally based on lies.

Not to mention, if the technology is that good, then it will be trivial to abuse this for corporate espionage, phishing, blackmail, slander, etc. Sure, if they don't do it, someone else will, but that's never been a valid excuse.

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Oof sorry to hear you had that experience. Not everyone wants generated content and that totally makes sense.

To us this is the next evolution to something like MailChimp or as another commenter mentioned- handwriting style fonts in marketing material.

As for abuse- we are heavily focused on making sure our platform is not abused. There are multiple checks in place to make sure only you can generate videos with your voice/face.

I mean, fake realistic handwriting fonts are universally hated, otherwise you'd see people using them for wedding thank you notes or other legitimate purposes. I've only seen them used in extended car warranty scams and similar.

And I'm sure you've thought about the abuse potential and you're doing what you can, but what's going to happen when accounts get hacked? Companies already have to train their employees to be wary of emails impersonating their CEO ("please wire me $10,000 immediately for a high profile account"), and it's going to be much harder to train everyone to mistrust video or even live video calls if Tavus works quickly. I guess it's inevitable, but again, you don't have to be the ones to bring that future to life.

These are all good points. Do you see use cases that you’d personally find useful?

For example we’re working with a telehealth company to provide weekly/monthly health updates that they otherwise would send through emails and people would ignore.

I’m personally more interested in these product use cases than sales/marketing. This is also why we require set templates that limit what you can change.

We are also working on the flip side of this problem. In addition to building this platform Tavus is also building detection tools as we continue to explore what disclosure should be required on these videos. I know in that sense we’re both fire fighters and seem like we’re arsonist. However we’re really focused on providing a tool that builds immersive experiences while also fighting bad actors from other platforms that precede us/will come after us.

Nothing I'd personally find useful, but that's not the issue, I understand not every product is for me.

Maybe it would help if you included testimonials from people consuming the videos, rather than just producers. At the moment I genuinely can't imagine anyone feeling anything but misled and disappointed upon discovering their "personalized" message was actually auto-generated, but if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. If you have feedback from viewers of your videos (not just sales people seeing demos, actual end recipients) that understand how they were made and still like them, I think that would help demonstrate some positive value.

Edit: Maybe language learning? I wonder if hearing myself speaking a new language would help me learn it.

This is a fantastic suggestion. Providing the end consumer perspective is definitely something we can do- we'll work on adding that to our website.

Language learning is a super cool use case! We're working on other languages atm

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