We can generate 15-hour training courses in under 20 minutes | Hacker News Reader

We can generate 15-hour training courses in under 20 minutes

1 pointESibio12 comments

We’ve been building this for about two and a half years and it’s been live for a year now. It’s an AI pipeline that creates full training courses end to end, not just outlines but slides, transcripts, quizzes, and voiceovers. Right now it can spin up about an hour of content in five minutes or 10–15 hours in around twenty minutes. We do have paying customers so it’s not just an experiment, but growth has been slow. We’re not the Stanford dropout story with $10M in VC behind us, and I’m not a Forbes 30 under 30 founder waiting to be sentenced for fraud either. We're just a small team trying to push this forward. The pattern so far has been companies say they want it, we run demos, some sign on, but most never convert, and sales cycles are long (3+ Months).

So I’m trying to figure out where this kind of capability actually fits best. Is it corporate training, higher ed, certifications, consumer learning? If you can generate effectively infinite training on demand, how do you convince people it’s not junk content? I’ve reviewed thousands of hours myself and even run AI checks outside the platform, (I have built courses the old fashioned way for UCSD, the USAF Innovation labs, and Northrop Grumman) and the material is solid, but that alone hasn’t seriously moved the needle. If you were bootstrapping or running on a tiny seed budget how would you approach growth without leaning on the hype machine? I’d really like to hear from people who went through the GTM struggle and came out the other side.

Thanks.

every single training I attended (30 years of hacking) has always been all about the instructor. I have attended myriad of conferences and take myriad of courses and there is 100% common thread for ones that I stuck with and were useful and were ones I’d pay shitton of money again - instructor/teacher.

I am not sure how that can be “translated” into AI-generated content but I wish you all the best!!

Thank you for this! There are super emotional and engaging TTS models that exist, but they're also very expensive when you're generating between 1 hour and 15 hours of content per course. We use one thats balanced between not a robotic terrible TTS, but also affordable and scaleable.

I also take ton of courses, and to be honest, I am usually taking one of my own courses in the background for professional development. Right now I am listening to a course on "Secrets of Sand Hill Road" by Scott Kupor. It helps me to pick up concepts more quickly without the filler as it would take me 9 hours to listen to the audiobook and its about 1.5 hours in course form with quizzes.

Three truths:

Most people at healthy sceptical of Ai quality and accuracy.

You don't want to pay your employees taking courses where they learn falsehoods or pure bad practices. Combine that with the above truth, and you're up for a big uphill in getting sales.

If you can't sell your product or service at a cost less than the €100-200 (usually the highest amount the lowest level manager can approve), you need to add a zero to compensate for the increaseing cost of obtaining a customer due to the overhead of getting the next level manager's approval. Since you did old fashioned courses for the military industry, you never had that level appear as a Blocker, since they are used to pay.

I can't offer advice, especially since the edu market is really saturated with very varying quality.

This is really good insight. Were able to sell a basic annual sub in the range you're talking about, and our highest tier annual sub price is 1k/yr.

The edu market, and AI course generators in particular are pretty saturated right now. When we started none existed, and we were the first to market, but because I dont have deep connections we didnt raise 3 million to build it.

Do you think there is more of a market for this in pivoting to consumer sales? Elearning is saturated, but being able to make whatever course youre looking for on demand is kindve awesome. I personally use it and love it, I have tried other tools and really none of them compare to what we do.

I'm super skeptical. I teach math in the first year of the university of Argentina. I usually have to oversee like 20 TA, that rotate because they move to another hour or building or something. As the sibling comment says, it all about the instructor.

> how do you convince people it’s not junk content?

Do you have some free samples? Are the parts of the course choose wisely? Is it correct? Are the slides good or wall of text or just irrelevant photos? Is the narrator fine or too boring or a screaming idiot?

The instructor is not SUPER engaging, but delivers easy to understand, relevant, factual information. If I had to rate it with a udemy monotone instructor being a 1 and a high end masterclass being a 10, I would put us about a 5. Better than the lower quality udemy courses, but not as good as the masterclasses with million dollar production budgets. We can make the content more engaging, but its going to take a significant amount of money.

You can make a course for free and see the curriculum but only take the first lesson, theres also three test courses you can see and take on the demo.

The curriculum is as expected based on the type of course you ask for. Like most generative AI, the more detail you give in the prompt, the closer the outcome is to what you were looking for within some reasonable limitations. Data is correct, slides are a little on the dry side (like most slide based courses) Text in slides is sometimes misspelled (like most generative AI images) we can use better image models that misspell less, but the cost per course can range exponentially, in advanced courses we generate as many as 1000 images. Narrator is mediocre, like some of the better lectures i had in school. not the best, not the worst.

https://www.Evapro.ai - Feel free to check it out, we appreciate all feedback. It works best on computer, still working on mobile optimization so if you say mobile sucks, we already know its awful lol.

I tried it. Some random comments:

* I tried to build a course about "banana cultivation". (I always try projects posted in HN with "banana" related questions for no good reason.) The system didn't understand me or I didn't understand the system, and I got a course about "Offices". Now I'm stuck in "I'm not sure how to proceed. Please try again." My recommendation is to pick friend and ask him/her to use the site without previous instructions. Watch him/her form 1 or 2 yards behind, with your mouth closed and your hands crossed on your back so you don't try to help. Thanks profusely and later fix the problems you see and then get a new friend to try again.

* Are you generating the full course? Why not just the part that is visible for free? ;)

* The slides are too bland. In my course about "Offices", I got one explaining the difference of a laptop and a desktop computer, and the parts of the computer like cpu/screen/keyboard. For real users I expect a more advanced course. I'm not sure about corporate courses that need to just exist to tick a box. Sadly, they may be even more profitable.

* I like the general design of a few sentences in a big font and a image. Is it possible that the slide highlight each sentence while it's reading/explaining it? I like to use the mouse or the pointer or my hand to show which sentence I'm talking about. I din't find typos, but my English is not so good.

* For corporate courses, they may like to add a logo, name of the company, which section of the company made the course (so the local boss get the credit). A nice first slide and a last thanks/questions slide. Remember to charge for them ;)

* The images are somewhat related, but do not help the explanation. For example in the desktop computer I expect a image of the computer with arrows that show each part (with labels in text that are hard for AI), but I got an image of a desktop computer facing a laptop in a position that were impossible to use neither of them. Arrows are nice, lot's of arrows.

* In another slide I got printers, and the difference between inkjet and laser printer. I expect arrows and labels. I know it's hard, perhaps impossible with the current AI. So you may decide it's better to ignore this feature request for now.

* For corporate courses, expecting a real computer is fine, but people may prefer to watch them in the cell phone anyway. For people outside the office, assume everyone uses the cell phone. Optimizing for cell phones is an important feature. I recommend to prioritize it.

* Even the images of the 3 sample courses take forever to load. Are you sending them at high resolution? This shoud be easy to fix. (It's no my area, so I'm not sure how to fix it. But I'm sure there are people that know.)

Amazing except you've got it reversed: You want to be able to take with comprehension a 15 hour training course in 20 minutes.

Thats a solid point, we plan to integrate directly with neurolink once they figure out how to download information to our brains. Then we should be able to install a 15 hour course in about 20 seconds as long as you have a decent internet connection.

In reality, most of the basic concepts of things you want to learn can be done in a beginner level course, which is around an hour and we can make them in around 5 minutes. In example, you want the core understanding of Never split the difference by Chris Voss, you can take a one hour course and save yourself about 7 hours if you typically use audible, and better understand the material because of the quizzing we do in each module.

Should I ever have the extreme misfortune to be assigned "AI" training, I will be working up the ladder starting with my supervisor to point out every single flaw (of which it will be riddled).

Training should be thoughtful, not thoughtless. It should not be deliberate crap.

I know its not meant to be appreciated, but I actually really appreciate this insight. while the current product provides relevant and factual information, I would say its slightly better than most Computer based training. Not super engaging, but well delivered and not a COMPLETE snoozefest either. We have plans to make it more engaging in the future, but its going to cost a significant amount of money to do what we want to do.

No, I meant it. Corporate "trainings" stink. Very bad. But if the "compliance" people don't care enough to make even half-assed training, and instead substitute LLM generated weirdness that demonstrates contempt for me and for the subject matter, I've got a license to misbehave, civilly since this is HN. I promise to make everyone I can uncomfortable in a civil manner about any such generated training.

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