Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Reddit and YouTube reviews

Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by jsheard on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:22PM (#39870144)

Likewise on YouTube, which OPs service is also pulling from, several times now I've gone looking for reviews of a specific product and one of the top results has been a TTS voice reading a probably ChatGPT-generated "review" which invariably recommends the product because the point is to get you to click the affiliate link in the description. The channels I saw were posting "reviews" so frequently and consistently, and for such random products that I suspect the entire operation is completely automated.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by qiongzhouh on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:35PM (#39870230)

Hmm, that's interesting. I've been getting a lot of Instagram and Tiktok reels with the robotic TTS voice nowadays, I've just been assuming that it's a funny thing that people do so that they don't have to record their own voice.

Wondering how / if we should be filtering out this content now that you can make TTS voices that sounds like they're completely real

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by jsheard on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:43PM (#39870274)

Even with a perfectly convincing TTS voice it's still given away by the fact that they don't show themselves on video interacting with the product, they usually just show a slideshow of official product images. At least some people must already be falling for this crudely generated content for it to be worth their while to produce it though.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by btown on Saturday March 30, 2024 @12:22AM (#39871811)

There's an interesting phenomenon where a certain type of rapid-to-experience, entertaining content, often with an enjoyable twist, has become synonymous with the glaringly imperfect TikTok voice... and thus, conversely, creators use TTS to signal that their content is similarly entertaining. And as more and more traditional creators start to use TTS, real voices become devalued as a quality signal. Avoiding recording is only a part of the phenomenon!

https://gesserit.co/ (formerly tiktoktts) is one of the most popular ways to generate a TikTok-esque TTS voice outside of that platform. I don't think they could have chosen a better name!

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by qiongzhouh on Saturday March 30, 2024 @10:42AM (#39875348)

Wow, that voice on the page sounds exactly like what I hear on TikTok / Instagram all the time. Definitely evokes the feeling that I'm about to be entertained by something.

Thanks for sharing that, we'll have to think hard about how to measure the quality / realness of content online beyond the simple things like upvotes and subscriber count

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by dawalker on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:31PM (#39870210)

Interesting, haven't seen one of those yet. With public video+audio models getting much better that will only get way worse over time. Excited to see what YT/Google decides to do about it.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by jsheard on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:36PM (#39870236)

Example: search for "MSI G27C4X" on YouTube, for me at least both the first and second results are fake robot reviews. There are a couple of real impressions videos by real people but for some reason YouTube sorts them below the AI spam. One of those spam channels is posting multiple reviews per hour, with >11,000 videos and counting.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by dawalker on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:43PM (#39870273)

That's crazy, going to be really interesting once this ramps up/if it starts getting good traffic.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by AndrewCopeland on Friday March 29, 2024 @07:44PM (#39870282)

I've seen AI generated content about dog breeds, the content was absolutely horrible to watch and listen too.

In the near future we will have YouTube videos that pride themselves on being organically made, no GMOs and built by humans.

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Re:Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) – Product search based on Redd... by dawalker on Friday March 29, 2024 @09:41PM (#39871042)

lmao true, already seen a few companies gunning for the YouTube for AI generated videos mantel so we'll see how it goes

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