1750 – The Power of Deep Text Technology with Vitalii Romanchenko

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now vitale romanchenko vitale you are the ceo and co-founder of eli.io you're found on the web at eli.io this is e-l-a-i.io vitale it's great having you thanks josh thanks for opportunity absolutely well okay so this is exciting i think you know a lot of folks are going to be really interested in this conversation, but I'm going to tell you right now to our friend that's listening, you're probably just going to want to pull up the website so that you can see what it is that we are talking about. Vitaly, while I ask you, give us a quick overview of exactly what Eli is. Yeah. So basically we help businesses generate educational video content with real humans from just text.

1:46So we develop deep text technology that allows you to create like a digital copy of yourself. Also, we can do the voice cloning. And now you can have your digital copy and you can generate professional video content with you without using camera, studio, and green screen. And it can be at scale. So in minutes, you can generate hundreds of videos and then basically use it in your social media, in training, in education. Okay, so again, imagine it's an avatar of yourself. You feed it the text. And then all of a sudden, you have a video. So can you talk about maybe the high quality before we get into use cases?

2:23Because let me ask you this first. There are ways that you can use this, and I think it's going to be very, very good for business. But then there are other ways that I think that you might be tempted to want to use this. But, you know, again, my own editorial beliefs, you might not want to use it for everything, but there are certain things you absolutely want to use it. Let's talk about use cases first. What would be some, you know, you think about particularly your larger enterprise level clients that are using this. How are they using this internally and with their clients? Yeah, great question.

2:57So when we started the company, we were thinking about several use cases and we're thinking about like a more horizontal approach because this is a video editor and everybody can sign up and create videos for social media, for marketing, for education. but once we get more and more customers we analyze the the usage and understand that the best fit is for training videos for learning development departments in the big companies so if you need like a compliance trainings it security trainings if you need the chart and board in videos this solution is the best fit because you don't need to have the camera studio to create a video content and it's quite expensive and complicated and a long So it's quite heavy to create this content.

3:39And using our solution, you are able to basically, in several clicks, choose the avatar, type the text, or generate it with our solution. You can generate the script as well, and then click the render, and you will have the video. So it's that simple. And we see this solution is the best fit for training type of video content. Yeah. How do you avoid... You're familiar with the concept uncanny valley, right? where it's real enough that it looks human, but it's unsettling for some reason. How do you avoid the uncanny valley in a solution like this? And again, to anyone who's not familiar with what I'm talking about, go search YouTube and you'll find plenty of examples in movies where it's like, yeah, no, that was kind of weird.

4:26I think like Polar Express was one of those. It was like, it was really good, but sometimes it's in the middle where it's not entirely realistic. So can you address that topic? Yes, great question. So first of all, this is still early days of this tech, and this is highly complicated technology. We spent more than two years in deep tech research. We have a big team of AI researchers, and we already achieved quite good quality in terms of making digital humans. So this is the first thing. So technology is evolving, and in two years, you want to see the difference. The avatars will be much more emotional.

5:02We will add gestures. So this is a work in progress. This is the first thing. Second thing we realized that basically the creepiness of avatars, for some people, they think there is a creepy thing, but for others, they think it's great. It looks amazing. This is a big thing. So it's not like everybody think that they are bad, you know, or they have issues with the lip sync or something. So a lot of people think they're great. and a lot of people think like money-wise how can i create video content which is much more engaging to just you know plain ppt or plain pdf and like we talked to customers we did research and like to having a human in the video it increased engagement by 35 percent so it's like when you have the human in the video it's it's much more engaging also we talked to the professional and basically they're saying even if you put just an eyes in the video it still increases engagement because a human brain works like if person see uh like another human in the video they automatically start to think that somebody is looking at them you know so they are starting more yes paying more attention so from business perspective it's totally win you know and for learning content that's pretty good engagement from this type of hotel if you want like to recreate like the fashion advertisement, probably no, they are not that emotional, you know, but for training content, you can basically create the dialogues.

6:29You can have two avatars on the slide. You can have like a scenario based learning when, you know, as a trainer, you can basically do different cases. So it's super useful, super fast, and it gives much more results in terms of engagement for training videos. Let's talk about Vitaly. Let's say there's a case where someone has, maybe they've got reams and reams of educational content in their, you know, their backend or their membership area, their internal training, their intranet, and it's all text-based right now. And they know that engagement is pretty poor, right? So how could they use, or could they use Eli?

7:11And they say, listen, we've got, you know, maybe 80 different text-based lessons. And, you know, and I want to be sympathetic to their options, right? So you could create a video, right, that would just play an AI talking out all of the text on the screen, and no avatar, you know, it's just, you know, basically a PowerPoint presentation with that, that AI, and you could do that, right? Kind of what you're talking about the avatar, where you've got what clearly is a representation of a human that's talking to you or an animated version, which you could do as well, versus you could also, and we think about this third step, right?

7:54Because again, the goal here is we want to increase engagement with this content. And again, that is going to solve a major problem. So your third option is just go full video, you hire talent, you get the video studio. Can you talk about maybe those three different options for increasing engagement on all of this content that someone may have in their intranet or, you know, again, their membership area? Yeah. So usually if L &D department, the big company has a lot of money, a big budget, so they record it in basically in-house or have like the external team to do that for them. And we calculated.

8:31So to create one minute of training content, it might go to up to$1 ,000 per one minute. And the time needed is up to five hours. So again, it's a lot of time and money and you need to edit content. Another thing, after you created the video, if you want to change something, you will need to, again, to re-record it. If you need to localize it, you need the localization crew. So this is the one way how you can create videos with human, right? The other way is basically using generative AI tools like us. And if you have already written script, so using our solution, you can just paste the URL to that written script or document a blog post.

9:08And we automatically turn this page into the video slides. Then you click render and you'll have it. Then in one second, you basically click and can change the language and basically translate everything in one click into, let's say, Spanish and then render video. So now you have two videos in different formats in different languages. Another thing, if you already have a bunch of plain PPTX, you can upload the PPTX right now. We will parse the document automatically. And now you have the video from PPTX. The same with PDFs, the same with plain text. So we developed a tool inside called AI Storyboard.

9:43So it can parse large volume of text and create it like a storyboard that you then can transform into the video. So eventually, we're building the product that helps to transform large volume of text in different formats into the videos in the most easiest way. So in one click. So currently, these are two options, created in a traditional way, or basically created using Generative I, or just to have plain text, but it's not the case anymore. Everybody wants more interaction. Yeah. All right. Let me share another. What about, or have you seen clients use this? Maybe they have some really great high value content in their blog.

10:24Have you seen clients use this with their blog content? So definitely there are clients who are sharing their creations. We've also been featured in several media. We were in independent newspapers. We've been featured in Forbes, in different, in the Wired. So there was some content shared. And because we're subscription-based, a bunch of people just can sign up and create videos and you have a free minute. So we have more than 2 ,000 registered users per day. So a bunch of folks using solutions generate videos, and then they post it everywhere. So I think you can find a lot of videos made with us on the internet.

11:03Tell me more about some of the enterprise level. And I recognize that there's a few that, you know, because of NDA that you can't share. But what would be some examples of maybe some larger companies that you've worked with? And what was that? Yeah. So when we're talking about the enterprises, the major use case would be learning and development. and this is training videos. And overall, we have more than 1 ,000 active customers. And the big portion of them would be enterprise companies like Generali, like insurance.com, like PDB. So there are a bunch of companies who's creating videos. It can be a smaller tier of subscription.

11:41It can be higher tier of subscription. So it depends on the use case that they have. And you can also use this for multiple languages. Exactly, yeah. So there are two options here. So first we can do the voice cloning. So if you have your avatar, we can do the voice cloning. Now you can speak in 28 languages and it will sound like you. If you type in Spanish text and it's converted into Spanish speech, basically, with your accent. Or if you want to use like a standard voices that we have, and we have more than 100 languages and more than 400 different voices, you can just now translate the videos into a bunch of languages and generate multilingual content.

12:19Yeah. Well, you guys have one best in class AI video generator on your website, Eli.io. That's E-L-A-I.io. When somebody goes there, listen, you can try the platform for free, it looks like. You want to share maybe just a little bit about next steps? yeah so we have one minute for free the trial so you can basically play with it it's a self-serve platform you can just sign up and create first video also if you're interested in solution or a scalable case or you want like to do personalized sales at scale you know so then you can contact us and do the demo with us also we have quite advanced api and again you can integrate with the api and generate video content for chatbots or something like that.

13:08So a bunch of use cases. Well, Vitaly Romanchenko, again, congratulations on your success. You're the CEO and co-founder of Eli. You guys have been getting a lot of rave reviews and certainly gone through some significant growth over the past number of years. So thank you so much, Vitaly, for joining us. I really appreciate our conversation. Thank you.

13:33Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.

14:18Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.