Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

ElevenLabs is incredibly over-priced and that's how they were able to achieve the MRR that led to their incredible fundraising.

No matter what happens, they'll eventually be undercut and matched in terms of quality. It'll be a race to the bottom for them too.

ElevenLabs is going to have a tough time. They've been way too expensive.

View on HN

I hope they find a more unique product offering that takes hold. Everybody thinks of them as text-to-speech but I use ElevenLabs exclusively for speech-to-speech for vtubing as my AI character. They're kind of the only game in town for doing super high quality speech-to-speech (unless someone here has an alternative which I'd LOVE to know about). I've tried https://github.com/w-okada/voice-changer which is great because it's real-time but the quality is enough of a step down that actual words I'm saying become unclear and difficult to understand. Also with that I am tied to using my RTX 3090 desktop vs ElevenLabs which I can do in the cloud from my laptop anywhere.

I'm pretty much dependent on ElevenLabs to do my vtubing at this point but I can't imagine speech-to-speech has wide adoption so I don't know if they'll even keep it around.

Are you comfortable sharing the video & lip-sync stack you use? I don't know anything about the space but am curious to check out what's possible these days.

For my last video I used https://github.com/warmshao/FasterLivePortrait with a png of the character on my RTX 3090 desktop and recorded the output of that real-time but in the next video I'm going to spin up a runpod instance and do the FasterLivePortrait in the cloud after the fact because then I can get a smooth 60fps which looks better. I think the only real-time cloud way to do AI vtubing in the cloud is my own GenDJ project (fork of https://github.com/kylemcdonald/i2i-realtime but tweaked for cloud real-time) but that just doesn't look remotely as good as LivePortrait. Somebody needs to rip out and replace insightface in FasterLivePortait (it's prohibited for commercial use) and fork https://github.com/GenDJ to have the runpod it spins up run the de-insightfaced LivePortrait instead of i2i-realtime. I'll probably get around to doing that in the next few months if nobody else does and nothing else comes along and makes LivePortrait obsolete (both are big ifs).

AIWarper recently released a simpler way to run FasterLivePortrait for vtubing purposes https://huggingface.co/AIWarper/WarpTuber but I haven't tried it yet because I already have my own working setup and as I mentioned I'm shifting my workload for that to the cloud anyways

Do you mind sharing your yt account? If you are okay with linking it to your hn account. I'd quite like to see the results.

I was curious as well.

Not OP but via their website linked in their profile -

https://youtu.be/Tl3pGTYEd2I

you can't be too expensive as a first mover provided you sell your service

whatever capital they've accrued, it won't hurt when the market prices are lower

Reply on news.ycombinator.com