The AI Voice Revolution with Mahmoud Felfel of Play.ht

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Mahmoud Felfel** (0:45)
We're working with the South Park studios. They're making a new episode and they'll be using one of our voices also for one of the characters. That's super exciting. Like, oh my God, like this voice is now being used in production, actual shows. We started with traditional text-to-speech use cases. The main driver for us to do that investment because it was like very risky. So we did all like that investment because we wanted to get into that market of like the human voice, like all voice over actors and the opportunities this can open because this was the first time ever you're automating the human voice.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:18)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host Erik Torenberg.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:41)
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**Nathan Labenz** (2:26)
Mahmoud Felfel is the CEO of Play.ht, the AI-powered text-to-voice generator. We've told you episode after episode that transformers are working for everything, and that includes generating what Play.ht calls ultra-realistic human voices. When Mahmoud started Play.ht just three years ago, serviceable but obviously robotic texts to speech services were the standard, and neural voices were just getting started. Just two years ago, a custom voice with a leading provider required hours of audio and cost $10,000. Today I can clone my voice with just 10 minutes of audio at minimal cost in less than an hour.
I can hear myself reading content just like this. And just as in other subfields of AI, progress is not slowing down. Mahmoud talks about the next generation of text-to-voice models working more like image generators do today, with a rich prompt space that allows you to effectively direct the quality of voice output. If there's one AI development society has predicted, which is very intuitively dual use, it's deepfakes. But somehow they are already here, and we are definitely not prepared. Already on TikTok, I'm seeing creators say that their families have been scammed and starting to recommend family passwords that impersonators wouldn't know. Now, I was genuinely impressed with Mahmoud's approach to user safety and preventing abuse. To his credit, he does have a multi-pronged approach.
But it seems like there's only so much builders like Mahmoud can do to protect us from the downsides of AI. And we're likely going to have to figure out how to deal with the world of convincing deepfakes quickly. And as much as that does worry me, I also share Mahmoud's amazement and delight over the technology and the products that he's able to build with it.
Making this was easy, quick, and genuinely fun. And I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mahmoud Felfel. Mahmoud Felfel, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Mahmoud Felfel** (4:30)
Thank you.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:32)
Yeah, my pleasure. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So you obviously are the founder and CEO of Play.ht. And you guys are in the, you know, what would be traditionally called the text to speech business. You might also call it the voice generation business, as we'll get into a little bit later. You know, you might even call it the, at least the audio side of the deep fake revolution that's kind of coming our way. So I'm really excited to talk to you. I've been personally a customer. And I would say, you know, pretty demanding kind of exacting customer in the, in the space of the technology that you're building, because at my company, Waymark, we make TV commercials for local and small advertisers.