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Last week we made a few big announcements, including the latest Descript release: a full multitrack podcast production studio. (Relaunch the app to update, or download here.)

‍‍Babak Nivi agreed to let us peek behind the scenes at the process for turning one free-flowing conversation into many short episodes of the Naval Podcast. Here’s how they do it:

In this post, we introduce MelGAN, a new generative model of raw audio waveforms created by the Lyrebird team that is capable of generating natural sounding speech at a rate of more than 2,500,000 audio samples per second — more than 100x faster than real time, and 10x faster than alternative methods on similar hardware.We believe that MelGAN paves the way for taking many real-time speech applications onto smaller devices. Imagine, for example, in the not too distant future, having real-time text-to-speech translation on your mobile device without the internet. And, it’s application to music translation brings us one step closer to AI-assisted music composing.We’ve open sourced MelGAN and we encourage interested machine learning developers and researchers to check out our code base.

This post continues our series on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the foundational technology that powers Descript’s super-fast transcription.

Anyone in audio or video production has experienced the frustration of reviewing tape and finding just the right sound bite for a story… if only the speaker hadn’t flubbed some words or forgotten to mention something crucial at the right time. Sometimes the only choice is to go through the effort of re-recording or leaving out the almost-perfect sound bite altogether.