Can you elevate your pitch with AI?

 

Working at Hopsworks has been a great experience for many reasons, but one of the main attractions for me personally has been and still is the proximity that it offers me to some of the most exciting IT developments in our lifetime: the rise of Artificial Intelligence in an innumerable number of business use cases.

Of course, much of that interest and the fascination for it is fueled by the impressive achievements offered by Large Language Models (LLM) and their applications:  LLMs are such powerful tools, when used in capable hands, of course, that they can really offer massive productivity enhancements and therefore, new fields of application. 

In my own daily work, I use LLMs (either Google's Gemini or OpenAI 's different ChatGPT based systems) very regularly - increasingly so. I have found it to be a superbly useful tool for writing, summarizing, coding and just in general, learning. And recently I had a couple of amazing experiences that have simply been too good not to share. One of them I already wrote about: using ChatGPT as an interactive role-playing agent to practice objection handling. It is a baffling experience.

But here's another one. I recently tried to generate a short "Elevator Pitch" for Hopsworks, which goes something like this:

The Hopsworks AI Lakehouse is unique: it provides organisations like yours with the data infrastructure for your Machine Learning systems, allowing you to streamline all your MLOps tasks, teams and processes quickly and efficiently. With the AI Lakehouse, all your stakeholders benefit. First, your individual data scientist, data engineer, or machine learning engineer benefits, because they will be able to work with the same consistent operational infrastructure for all of their tasks. They will save precious time by not having to integrate the infrastructure themselves, and spending more time with their actual day jobs. Second, your data science or machine learning team leader will win because the AI lakehouse will make the team more efficient, and therefore they will be able to do more with less, and contribute more and better end results back to the business. Thirdly and lastly, your governance team will win, because the centralized infrastructure will be much easier to govern, making compliance with the latest and upcoming AI regulations much easier. This is how Hopsworks makes the booming AI application space much more valuable and attainable for your organisation. 

I wanted to figure out a way to customize this "Pitch" for different potential prospects, and see if I could use AI tools to do so. So I tried a bunch of tools, and found that they all have their different strengths and weaknesses. I found that the voice synthesis of ElevenLabs was clearly the best and most flexible around, but then also found that Google Vids offered some amazing capabilities, and could get me some crazy nice results super easily.

So: let me show you some of the results. Here's a Youtube playlist with some of the videos that I generated:

 

I thought that was pretty cool, but... I was also pretty underwhelmed with the lack of intonation and variation that was delivered by these AI voices. They are good - way better than the robo-voices of yesteryear, but they are nowhere near the quality of a real, human voice. To try and prove that - with my limited acting / voiceover skills, here's how I would deliver the same pitch:

There you go. I think it was amazing to see how far the technology has gotten already, and how easy it has become to make custom pitches for specific environments in a fairly automated way. But it's also pretty clear that we still have a way to go and that for now, personal and human content will stand out pretty clearly.

Hope that was a useful experiment. As always, I look forward to your comments and reactions!

Cheers

Rik