**Unlocking the Power of AI-Generated Videos**

When you opened it, you were greeted with a video from the person that company was saying, "Hey there Quinn, you know it's been great to work with you this year... da da da da and I mean that." This was just one example of how companies are now using AI-generated videos to connect with their customers. The possibilities are truly limitless, as it's a matter of how the individual wants to leverage this new technology at their fingertips.

With AI-generated videos, the constraints of traditional video production are no longer applicable. You can think at scale and consider things you normally do with someone that you really like or a very important customer, now you can do that on a much larger level because you're not bound by limitations such as only being able to communicate with five people that you hold dear or your biggest customers. This is a game-changer for businesses looking to expand their reach and engage with their audience in a more personalized way.

**The Reality of AI-Generated Videos**

So, are people aware that the video was generated by AI? The answer is no. You likely wouldn't be able to tell that it was AI-generated, which is both exciting and reassuring for those who want to create content without being too obvious about it. However, what gets interesting is the intent behind the video and why it's effective. It's not because it's fooling someone or trying to trick them into recording a video; it's because it provides well-crafted content in a form that people prefer.

We've seen customers who have actually disclosed that the video was generated by AI, and surprisingly, it hasn't made a difference in terms of engagement. In fact, some companies have reported identical results when they use AI-generated videos versus traditional ones. This brings us back to the root hypothesis: people care about receiving video content from someone who is speaking to them about something they care about. It's not necessarily about tricking or making them seem like you recorded it.

**Building Foundations for AI-Generated Videos**

So, how do we build these foundational models that are underneath the API? This is a complex problem that requires endless challenges and has been tackled by an amazing research team at Tavis. They've been working on developing high-quality video production capabilities using AI algorithms, which is no easy feat.

One of the biggest hurdles is defining what constitutes a high-quality video and how to benchmark it quantitatively. This requires collaboration between technical teams and subject matter experts to ensure that the output meets the desired standards. Despite these challenges, the team has made significant progress in developing foundational models for AI-generated videos.

**Getting Started with Tavis**

If you're interested in building with Tavis, you can start by signing up on their website. They offer a range of APIs and tools that allow developers to create their own AI-generated video content. The API is designed to be simple and accessible, making it easy for anyone to get started.

Tavis encourages users to dive right in and experiment with the API. If you have any questions or need help, they're happy to provide support or schedule a call to discuss your project further. With Tavis, you can unlock the full potential of AI-generated videos and create engaging content that resonates with your audience.

**Joining the Rabbit Hole**

As I sat down for this conversation, I realized just how exciting and complex the world of AI-generated videos is. It's a rabbit hole that I'm eager to explore further, and I invite you to join me on this journey. Whether you're a developer, marketer, or simply someone interested in staying ahead of the curve, there's never been a better time to dive into the world of AI-generated videos.

With Tavis, you can start building your own digital twin today and see where it takes you. Don't be afraid to ask questions or seek help – the team is always available to support you on this journey. Who knows what kind of amazing content we'll create together? The possibilities are endless, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this revolution in video production.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow building with AI top of mind I'm your host Demetrios and this episode is brought to you by Deep Grim the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like twilio Spotify NASA and City Bank we are joined in this episode by Quinn the co-founder of Tavis how you doing today man hey to me doing good thanks for having us well I'm excited to jump right into a bit of your history because I know you were a teal fellow you dropped out of the University of Michigan to pursue what seems like a bit of a dream can you tell us how that happened yeah it's it's quite the quite the roller coaster of a story so B raised in Michigan so in the Summers uh spent all my time in the water in the winter spent my time on ice skates and uh you in in trade went to University of Michigan for college and while I started there after a year or two I I realized that it wasn't necessarily for me and at the time my my current co-founder and I were building together and starting to work on just different random projects and uh things like that so after my second year at at Michigan I ended up dropping out around that time joined the T and then that's when Hanan and I really started building Tavis as well and it's it's quite a cool story how we stumbled upon it so maybe I can even take a step back and and tell you a little bit about what Tavis is before I get into how we came up with the idea and how we came to where we are today but Tavis is a research AI research company that focuses on generative video uh and we really make this accessible to the world through apis so we allow developers and product teams to build humanlike experiences video experiences with really easy to use AP I so what our platform really focuses on is creating personal digital Twins or digital clones allowing the end users to actually leverage their own likeness at scale so in simple words you can clone yourself without ever actually saying a word or reporting a video which is pretty dang cool so to be maybe maybe I'll stop there um and and happy to go in any direction you want but wanted to give a little overview first before I dive too deep what a journey first of all I want to hear all about actual evolution of Davis in just a second but I would like to touch on a few points one is you started in the te Fellowship you were creating and crafting the idea then then you went through YC and then you went and got funding by seoa these are not like small names this is some big names that are being thrown around how has that felt all along the journey and is there anything that you look back on and you go okay cool we we've done this I imagine you're still probably thinking it's day one but there's been some validation already yeah the validation has been nice right it it comes in waves and I think it's the the journey is certainly a roller coaster and it has its fair share of ups and it's it's fair share of downs I think what we've been really lucky with with all of our partners whether it's YC or sequa or scale Ventures is we just they're exactly that they're partners and we've just found really really great relationships with them where they've been able to support us and and we've been able to work great with them but I think what's ultimately really helped us is we focused on one our customers what do they need what are their challenges and how can we solve for them and then two our product we really focus on building the best AI models out there and creating the best experience around them so it's those two things that have really guided us through it and in my opinion helped us to get some of this validation but at the end of the day what really matters is our customers using the product and how many of them are using the product so talk to me a little bit about the inspir ation behind the product itself and how you land it on realizing that there is a market need for people to create digital twins of themselves it's a funny story so we started building AI videos back in 2020 or so long before AI was cool this is when AI videos were the you know big bad word of deep fake instead of generative AI which is you know feels like quite quite a while ago that's so fun and we we stumbled across the or we came across the idea as and I were working at a different company at the time and we were working with uh a few of our friends and companies trying to scale their companies and we were helping them out with just different business growth things whether it's like email campaigns or others and they were just at a really difficult time getting users Etc so we suggested that they they used videos so one night I remember I stayed up from 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. recorded 200 videos for for one of them very similar just saying like you know hey Quinn saw you work at Tavis hey Demetrio saw you work at Graham things like that sent it out and and the next morning got a ton of responses and that was our initial validation right that video is really just a a better way to communicate a more effective way to communicate now that was back in 2020 as as the years have evolved right we've seen video become more and more predominant in today's society especially short form video you look at Tik Tok Instagram reals YouTube shorts right it's uh becoming the main form of communication everywhere which is is quite amazing and then what you're also seeing is a really high degree of personalization High degree of relevancy and that's why Tik Tok does really well right when you watch a video feels like it's for you it's made for you it's relevant to you and what our product does in today's role is it Bridges those two items so we allow users to create hyper personalized hyper contextual videos without having the typical pain points of actually recording a video where they have to get ready you have to make sure your microphone is set up you have to you know sit down and make sure that recording environment is good instead your you're really able to just sit down and just as you would send an email write a video script and be be good to go wow okay it's funny that you mentioned that because just before we started recording this I was watching Tik Tok and going down a little bit of the rabbit hole and having fun with that and that's how I I like to take breaks sometimes and enjoy those funny random videos and getting the remixes and all that but it sounds like you started with the initial intention of doing this for salese is that a correct assumption yeah so for the first year or two we really focused it on marketing and sales experiences so think about like a workflow where if someone submits a form on a website they would get a video back from maybe the CEO or the head of sales or someone like that and the use cases there were really cool we worked with Mohamed pop e-commerce Fortune 500s Airlines across the board it was it was quite awesome but what we found is um maybe in like 2022 2023 or so that some of our best users and the ones we really left working with were the ones actually trying to build with Tavis so they kept asking us for for more API support and uh you know different features that that would support them building Tavis into their product so we made a decision in in 2023 to really focus in on that audience and expose our apis to the world where developers could start to build on our products and that to us was was just amazing so in today's world we predominantly focus on empowering product and developer teams uh to build in AI videos to their products to their apps with our ai ai models so it's been quite an exciting Journey there as well so how have you seen people using this you mentioned building AI into their products what are some of these use cases there there's some really cool ones so we're seeing crms built it in uh as workflow tools so they're Distributing it to there like sales and marketing teams using that uh CRM where they can just click a button within a workflow and it automatically adds a video we're seeing it with video communication platforms where they're adding AI Avatar functionality so instead of actually having to click record uh you're actually able to just generate a video of yourself or create a scalable motion and we're also seeing it quite across the board with video editors different product teams things like that so it's been it's been really cool to watch the adoption and I think my my favorite part about Tavis is just watching how people continue to come up with ideas of where AI videos could be applied and use that we've never even thought of or or it's never crossed our minds yeah I know one is the education space and that feels like a really big space that people can take advantage of because if I'm trying to articulate something or I want to I want to get some lectures out there I can just create the lecture and then I don't need to necessarily record myself and have to cut up the parts only that I like and all of that I do see the ease at which I would hope this this works right that that's awesome that you bring up the education space uh one of the things we ask every employee who who comes onto the tapis team when they first join is what's their vision for tapist and and we found that everyone has a really unique vision for example my co-founder's vision is uh that when you get off the ride at say Disney World you know there is Tony Stark Iron Man saying hey Demetrius thanks for thanks for riding it was you know great great to have you whereas uh my vision is that the elementary school teacher can send a uh personalized recording to each of their students reading a book at their learning level which is is such an engaging way of teaching right so um I love that you use that example and I hope that in the next uh few years that's a world we can live in and so really you're trying to just say you know what we don't want to throttle this product by deciding how people are going to use it and what verticals they're going to use it in we're just going to create a product that anyone can call and incorporate into what they're building spot on if we make it easy enough to build with easy enough to use our hope is that we unlock creativity with anyone who has ideas on how to use it let me let me see here if I want to create a Lal twin of myself how much video and audio do you need of me before you can feel like you have a nice representation yeah so it's a lot easier than you'd think so we just need one to two minutes of audio and video uh you sitting there talking you can be saying anything so you can talk about deep you can talk about Tavis you can talk about D hops any anything you want uh you would send us that video via API our system would take a few hours process it train it and get you a really refined replica back the clone of your s back and then from there it only takes the API call to actually generate a video of it with using a specific script wow and I can be wearing different clothes or I can be shaved and unshaved with a mustache spot spot on however however you want the replica to look that is that is all you I could so I can have my Hawaiian version I can have my Swiss albs version I I've got my investor version my customer version my happy version my friend's version oh that is so cool yeah that makes it really nice and then the background also and where you're actually generating these videos I I guess I could be on the top of the Swiss ABS or the mat horn or I could be in Hawaii on the beach spot spot on you could be you could be walking around selfie style and and have a Tik Tok Style video you could be at a really nice podcast recording studio and get something more professional or you could even be in the office so it's super super Dynamic really you can you can put things anywhere I think one of my one of my favorites that we've seen is that we had a doctor on the work site uh who did a recording setup there and I I thought that was the coolest thing ever yeah the creativity is unlimited and you talk about creativity I mean it it really is boundless um one of the examples I'd love to give is how people actually share and send the video so when you think of sending a video normally you probably think email text message embed it into a product experience one of the coolest ones I've seen we had a Fortune 500 company who wanted to reach out to a audience that they were working with so around the holiday season they actually generated 1,000 videos and downloaded each one to a physical card like a a snail mail MP4 player and sent out the personalized video VIA mail uh so it arrived in your mailbox and when you opened it it was a video from the person that company saying hey there Quinn you know it's been great to work with you this year da da da da and I mean that that puts my money where my my mouth is here when we talk about unleashing creativity exactly the possibilities are really Limitless because it's just a matter of how I want to leverage this new technology that is at my fingertips and being able to I I can only fathom that when you're thinking at scale and you're thinking about things that you normally do with someone that you really like or someone that is a customer that's very close or a very important customer now you can do that at a much larger level because you're not bound by oh I can only do this to the five people that I hold the most dear or that are my biggest customers because you don't have to take that time and so I could see it being for sure something that is on repeat are people aware that it's an AI generated video at or how does that is it really real looking so I may be fooled into thinking that oh yeah like they are actually reaching out to me how does that go over yeah that that's like good question with a complex response so on video quality if I was to send you a video today uh of AI Quinn you likely wouldn't be able to tell that it was AI uh which is you might be AI right now I could be I could be and we'll have a surprise for you in a few months here where uh you you'll find that pretty interesting and it could be AI Quinn talking to you but wow um so yes uh you you may not often be able to tell that it's AI but where it gets interesting is the intent of the video and the reason why the video is effective is not because it's fooling to someone it's not because it's freaking someone into you recording it it's because it's providing well-crafted content in a form that people prefer so we have quite a few customers to actually disclose this was generated by AI right or or some similar message and we've seen the results between the two style of videos to be exactly the same and identical which again brings it back to that root hypothesis that people care about receiving video content where someone is speaking to them about something they care about it's not necessarily about tricking them or making them seem like you recorded in fact if you do that it could be a negative trait right so we really want to empower that authentic communication here so you are going back to the technical side of how you're building this you're training the foundational models that are underneath the API yep spot out so all models we do inhouse wow and that seems like a very messy problem to get into there there's a lot of new challenges that we're we're working through as a team I mean even sometimes it's the simple thing right what does it mean to have a high quality quity video and how do you Benchmark that quantitatively right uh so there there's endless challenges but that's that's to me the the most fun part and we've got an amazing research team that that's on board so we've been been very lucky and very privileged to work with some some great minds out there on these foundational models well Quinn I'm so excited for everything you're doing I am going to get myself a digital twin right now and start playing around with it see where I can Outsource some of the different video creation that I do on a daily basis and uh I'll get back to you with the results I I love it give give it a sign up on the website let me know what you think and and send me the the digital clone version of yourself that's awesome go so where where do I go where I want to get rocking with this right now what is it Tavis doai check check it out it's Tavis Tav us. and if you're interested in building with Tavis just add a SL developer to that as well and you'll you'll have quite a bit of fun and be able to see our apis uh I always encourage people check out the API docs you'll see how simple it is and exactly how you can you can build with it and uh just Dive Right In and go for it and if you do have any questions feel feel free to reach out to me directly I'm happy to help or jump on a call too yeah there goes my weekend man I'm going down the rabbit hole this is great well I'll tell you a generative AI video is a fun Rabbit Hole to go on there there's a lot of fun stuff going on right now and especially when it comes to scaling that and deploying that there's some really really fascinating stuff going on excellent all right man thank you for doing this awesome well to thanks for thanks for having us\n"