0032: Pozotron Responds To Narrator Concerns About Data Retention

hey there hero it’s david h lawrence th
17th
uh recently positron which if you’re no
familiar is a service that allows you t
compare
the manuscript of an audiobook with the
narration that you create for that
manuscript and find the errors so that
you can do pickups
before the book is published it’s a
proofing tool
that you can use to make yourself look
brilliant and
there was a an issue recently with
positron where
a series of narrators in the community
were concerned that positron was hangin
on
to the audio that we were uploading and
potentially using it
to create ai voices and we’ve had
experience with
dot coms where they’ve just ignored our
concerns
but not in the case of positron and in
fact
they reacted so well and so completely
to
what we brought up to them that i wante
to have a conversation with their ceo
jake poznanski
and he agreed to do that so we’re going
to do that next right here
on this episode of the vo heroes podcas
[Music]
jake poznanski am i pronouncing your
name properly
yup that’s right awesome jake is uh the
co-founder
and is it ceo president grand poobah
supreme u-boat commander what is your
title at positron
ceo right now so that’s that’s my
current role it’s been
for a little while now so great now for
those of you who don’t know what
positron is positron is an amazing
saas services a software offering from
the company that allows you to
really do a great job proofreading proo
listening to
and comparing to the original manuscrip
what you
voiced uh for audiobooks and it’s made
me look like a brilliant superstar to m
clients
and uh i love telling other people abou
it
um what’s happened in the last couple o
months is it came up
uh in a number of different venues
that there was no way to delete the
audio
that you would upload to positron
when you do a project and
some people were afraid that
that positron was going to use that
audio to create
artificial intelligence-based voices an
compete against human voices
and i had the opportunity to talk to
jake maybe a month month and a half ago
something like that
um about this and say look this is a
concern of the community
and i really think you should address i
and
boy oh boy the reason i’m doing this
podcast episode is boy did you address
it
um you got you got big high falutin hig
money lawyers involved out of new york
to make sure
that everything was beautiful tell me
what your thought process was when when
i presented this
this conundrum to you yeah yeah first o
all thank you for
kind of bringing it to our attention it
was kind of something on the back burne
uh this kind of concern is something
like we watch
some of the forums and facebook groups
from time to time but
kind of i think is the right moment now
to really bring it to the forefront and
kind of
put this one to bed so kind of the firs
thing that’s always been
true is that positron does not share
your data
or sell your data to any third parties
so
all of the positron algorithms all the
positron magic that’s something that we
developed in-house
and so it doesn’t go out to any other
companies for processing
so that that was already kind of like
the baseline um
that we were starting from which i thin
was pretty good and
what kind of ended up is the result of
this confirmation of this conversation
was
we just wanted to confirm that you know
if you
want to delete your data from our syste
you totally can do that so now that’s
officially enshrined in our terms of
service
and then furthermore i think there’s
kind of like a second
aspect of this conversation is well a
lot of people talk about
ai voices and how that can potentially
one day
come to change our industry and we
wanted to put
that one to bed as well and we’ve added
in our terms of service language that
says
that we won’t create a likeness of your
voice
without your permission and it’s not
like we’re even working on that right
now
but if you know as technology develops
kind of the industry may change over
time
when that change occurs we’re not doing
anything without your permission
okay and and to be clear um there are
people who will immediately go wait a
minute
you’re not doing it without our
permission what does that mean is that
in your plans and
like you said you’ve stated to me that
it’s not in your plans
but who can predict what the future
holds i mean obviously
we have concerns about ai voices they’r
getting better they’re getting cheaper
for some books they can easily compete
with a human voice and the listener
wouldn’t know the difference
but i think the big part is being able
to delete
your data once you’ve finished using
positron for
your services and just to read verbatim
what you put in your terms of services
you now have
a section called data deletion option
customer may at any time initiate a
quote
delete project unquote request via the
user interface of the services
within one week of such initiation
service provider will cause customers
inputted data associated
with the applicable project to be
permanently deleted from the platform
and all other service provider systems
so that means servers that you may have
offloaded the data to
to do the pr the the processing of i
know you guys use amazon s3
for some of your storage or amazon
servers uh somehow
and um this is to me
the response time was the big thing not
just what you said
but how quickly you guys got together
and came up with this and how you got
your lawyers involved
uh you you had conversation with uh
union representatives with me
i just wanted to take a moment to
acknowledge
the fact that sometimes dot comers are
not
necessarily aware of
the effect of being enthusiastic about
technology
you know we went through this earlier
this year with another institution who
was really excited about using ai voice
and put out a press release
and they had no idea what kind of a
negative deleterious effect that had
on the human narrators that were the
bread and butter of their business
and so i thought it was great how
quickly you guys responded and there’s
another section
uh in your terms of service about the a
voice work and things like that
it just really it was like a shining
example of how a business looks at
things
and takes care of concerns
in a way that really told us at least
told me that you care about the future
of your business
and that you care about the people who
are making your business today
yeah oh thank you thank you for most
kind words and
one thing i always like to say about
positron is
you know our goal is not to automate
people away from the audiobook
creation process the goal is really to
give people
tools to take away some of the grunge
work
kind of the unpleasant parts the the
boring and repetitive and monotonous
tasks and kind of free you up to really
delight your listeners and
and make a great book that people will
want to listen to again and again
yeah yeah i think um now would be a
great time to
do a little psa and that is if you’re
using positron
just to generate a list of diffs a list
of of uh
errors and not going through that list
to confirm that those
errors are actual errors rather than
a judgment call that you’ve made or a
missing word that you needed to
put in or a purposeful mispronunciation
based on the content and there’s a
hundred other things that could be
the difference positron does a great jo
of just finding the difference between
the manuscript and what you said
but you always have to review that yes
and that’s really important because a
lot of people have just been using
positron
as a proofer in quotes generating this
list and handing it off to a narrator
without reviewing
the errors and i know that’s not how yo
designed the tool
right and to speak a little bit about
that
uh the way the positron system works
it’s just like you said
every time there is a discrepancy that
we can detect
between the manuscript and you’re
recording positron’s going to flag that
as hey you should take a look here um
but then it’s really up to
the customer to say oh you know this
sentence
oh yeah i totally flipped the the
meaning here that’s not what i was goin
for
kind of mark that as a pickup and go in
and fix it
but there are there are some cases and
it kind of depends on your project wher
oh maybe you made a small mistake but i
basically means the same thing it’s not
worth
picking up or uh you know sometimes
there’s even a typo in the book that yo
fixed as a narrator hopefully not too
many of those but we we know what
happens
so there’s kind of a bit of a judgment
call and i think there always will be a
judgment call no matter how good we mak
the service
i like to tell this story kind of one o
our early beta testers
submitted a book so the very first
versions of positron where
it processed the thing and inside of
this book
the main character goes into a bar
has a couple drink a couple drinks and
the narrator starts kind of slurring th
words of that character
and all of a sudden positron is saying
oh that’s wrong that’s wrong that’s
wrong that’s wrong
so that that’s kind of like a judgment
call we’ll never be able to make
maybe he was overplaying it a little bi
too
so if you if you as an audiobook
narrator or as
anybody who’s doing narration that need
to be uh verbatim
and and confirmed and is interested in
being accurate
if you want to try positron here’s
something that happened a few months ag
i was able to strong-arm jake and the
rest of the company
into not only giving my clients an hour
free which is their
their normal uh loveliness you can go o
pause it trying to get an hour free
but for my customers for my clients for
my students
jake is giving you seven hours free
and a discount on a number of the
options
that you have if you choose to subscrib
to the service
and all you need to do is go to
voheros.com
get hyphen positron the the url is bein
shown on your screen right now
go there and you’ll get not one but
seven hours for free
and you’ll be that’s that’s like a whol
book you can you can test a whole book
with that
and you want to talk about making you
look brilliant to your rights holders
and to your clients and to your
publishers oh my gosh
jake i so appreciate you being on the
the podcast with me and i appreciate
what you’ve done
to clarify uh what people can expect
from positron and the confidence that
they can have in you
as a company putting it in your terms o
service was just perfect
uh thank you so much i really appreciat
it oh thank
you and and thank you for your help in
getting the message out and
making sure that we’re aligned with the
narrator community which we
very much respect and like working with
so awesome
uh jake poznanski from positron if
you’ve got any questions about this if
you’re a narrator and you’re thinking
wait a minute hold on i’ve never even
heard of positron what is this all abou
uh how does it work what’s going on uh
first of all there’s another episode
where i show you how positron works but
if you have
any questions just scroll down below
this video
or if you’re listening uh uh the audio
version of this go ahead back to
voheros.com
this will likely be one of the very
first episodes you you see
in the articles area scroll down below
there leave me a comment leave me a
question love to answer it for you
i thank you so much for listening and
for watching
and we’ll see you in the next episode.