
DeepGram (YC W16) Is Building a Google for Audio - ascertain
http://blog.ycombinator.com/deepgram-yc-w16-is-building-a-google-for-audio
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seibelj
Many speech tech startups are sued endlessly over patents [0], primarily by
Nuance, and then when things look hopeless, Nuance offers to buy and make all
the lawsuits go away [1]. How do you view this situation, and how will you
fight the lawsuits?

[0] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-
ov...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-over-voice-
recognition-patents/) [1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-
patent-litig...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-patent-
litigation-nuance-acquires-vlingo/)

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noajshu
We're not familiar with the behind-the-scenes details of those cases, but
we're not competing with Nuance in the transcription game. We are doing really
killer audio search and view competition through that lens.

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Xcelerate
I posted this comment five days ago. It seems like audio indexing and
searching might be the next big thing.

> I've been wanting to make something like this for a while. Really nice
> product you have! I think this kind of service will really take off in the
> future. Imagine having an app that constantly records everything and allows
> you to search it later. Questions like "What did James tell me last November
> about traveling to Europe?". It would also eliminate hearsay, since you
> would no longer have to trust one person's word against another — you could
> simply search the transcript of that moment in the past. In the very long
> run, I almost wonder if such a tool would make lying obsolete.

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noajshu
I'm Noah, one of the founders. I also think lifelogging will be common in the
future because it's becoming easier to record everything and the benefits of
having that dataset are also increasing (that's where we come in) You're
correct that lying could become obsolete. It could be sort of like the changes
brought on by the Information Age, where now it's pointless to argue over
truths that are the public domain (since we can just look up the fact whenever
we need). It would extend that to private life.

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foobarqux
Have you seen "The Entire History of You" episode of Black Mirror?

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noajshu
It's one of our favorites :) I don't think it would be so bad to record our
lives. We would be more efficient scientists, journalists--explorers of
information. We could focus on the here and now instead of taking notes.

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bduerst
Or we would be stuck focusing on the best [and the worst] of past because it's
persistent, like in the episode.

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djhn
Reliving memories seems like a much more powerful drug when streamed directly
to your retina just as you experienced it.

I'm pretty sure it requires a whole other level of nostalgia to be immersed
and get lost in transcribed texts of the audio of an event.

Not that I'm saying the latter is what the tech will remain like, but at least
at first that's what it will probably look like.

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iofj
I have always wondered how patents and copyright apply to deep learning
networks. It is pretty obvious that the NMIST deep learning convolution
network uses the same algorithm patented in letter separation patents by OCR
companies. And yet ...

I wonder if you were to go further. Suppose you let a sufficiently deep neural
network see all simpsons episodes for instance. And it manages to make new
simpsons episodes. This will at some point become possible. At that point,
does it count as a new work ? Does it fall under simpsons copyright ? Where is
the line ?

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noajshu
I would love to see a computer-generated simpsons episode. I bet you could do
a basic version using DeepDream applied to the audio and video of a different
video / tv show. I imagine the voices and images would morph to sound more
simpson-like.

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matiasb
Looks great! I created a simple NodeJS wrapper for it:
[http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX](http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX)

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noajshu
Awesome, I'll take a look!

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sunsu
How does this compare to [http://clarify.io](http://clarify.io)?

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stephensonsco
The important difference is that DeepGram is a fuzzy search that can find
matches even if a text transcript is wrong. This is what ups the accuracy very
significantly.

I'm the other cofounder of DeepGram. I'm glad we're getting everybody's
feedback!

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vhiremath4
This is incredible. _BIG_ ups.

