Dan Kokotov is VP of Engineering at Rev.ai, an automatic speech recognition company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Rev: https://www.rev.com
Rev.ai: https://rev.ai

PODCAST INFO:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:23 - Dune
6:39 - Rev
12:39 - Translation
19:28 - Gig economy
28:08 - Automatic speech recognition
38:58 - Create products that people love
47:08 - The future of podcasts at Spotify
1:08:46 - Book recommendations
1:10:08 - Stories of our dystopian future
1:13:50 - Movies about Stalin and Hitler
1:19:05 - Interviewing Putin
1:25:02 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Dan Kokorov, VP of engineering at Rev.ai, which is by many metrics, the best speech to text AI engine in the world.

Rev in general is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI.

I've been using their services for a couple of years now and planning to use Rev to add both captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast to make it easier for people to read through the conversation or reference various parts of the episode, since that's something that quite a few people requested.

I'll probably do a separate video on that with links on the podcast website so people can provide suggestions and improvements there.

Athletic Greens, all in 1 nutrition drink.

So the choice is health, wisdom or money.

And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that I reached out to Dan and the Rev team for a conversation because I've been using and genuinely loving their service and really curious about how it works.

I previously talked to the head of Adobe Research for the same reason.

For me, there's a bunch of products, usually software, that comes along and just makes my life way easier.

Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, iZotope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automating keyboard and mouse tasks, Emacs as an IDE for everything, including the universe itself.

I can keep on going, but you get the idea.

I just like talking to people who create things I'm a big fan of.

That said, after doing this conversation, the folks at Rev.ai offered to sponsor this podcast in the coming months.

This conversation is not sponsored by the guest.

It probably goes without saying, but I should say it anyway, that you cannot buy your way onto this podcast.

I wanted to bring this up to make a specific point that no sponsor will ever influence what I do on this podcast, or to the best of my ability, influence what I think.

I wasn't really thinking about this, for example, when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, who is the CEO of Square, that happens to be sponsoring this podcast, but I should really make it explicit, I will never take money for bringing a guest on.

Every guest on this podcast is someone I genuinely am curious to talk to or just genuinely love something they've created.

As I sometimes get criticized for, I'm just a fan of people, and that's who I talk to.

As I also talk about way too much, money is really never a consideration.

In general, no amount of money can buy my integrity.

That's true for this podcast, and that's true for anything else I do.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on the Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Dan Kokorov.

You mentioned science fiction on the phone, so let's go with the ridiculous first.

What's the greatest sci-fi novel of all time in your view?

And maybe what ideas do you find philosophically fascinating about it?

The greatest sci-fi novel of all time is Dune, and the second greatest is the Children of Dune, and the third greatest is the god emperor of doing so.

I mean, it's just an incredible world that he created.

And I don't know if you've read the book or not.

It's 1 of my biggest regrets, especially because the new movie is coming out.

It's ridiculous to say, and sorry to interrupt, is that I used to play the video game, used to be Dune.

This, I guess you would call that real-time strategy.

Right, right, I think I remember that game.

Yeah, it was kind of awesome, 90s or something.

I think I played it actually when I was in Russia.

I think at the time that I used to live in Russia, I think video games were about like the specification of Pong, I think Pong was pretty much like the greatest game I ever got to play in Russia, which was still a privilege, right, in that age.

I always wanted to feel like a kid because my mom was a programmer.

I got her work and play like on, I guess, the equivalent of like a 286 PC, you know?

And by the way, the new movie I'm pretty interested in, but the original...

So there's a David Lynch movie, Dune, as you may know.

And I'm a huge David Lynch fan, by the way.

So the movie is somewhat controversial, but it's a little confusing, but it captures kind of the mood of the book better than I would say, like, most any adaptation.

And like, Dune is so much about kind of mood and the world, right?

So in the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, there's a sort of setting where Leto, 1 of the characters, he's become this weird sort of God Emperor.

I mean, you kind of have to read the book

You probably saw the worms in the trailer, right?

So he kind of like merges with this worm and becomes this tyrant of the world and he like oppresses the people for a long time, right?

And the purpose is to kind of break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization, right?

But people have gotten too comfortable, right?

And so you kind of oppresses them so that they explode and like go on to colonize new worlds and kind of renew the forward momentum of humanity, right?

And so to me, that's kind of like fascinating, right?

You need a little bit of pressure and suffering, right?

To kind of like make progress, not get too comfortable.

I don't know, maybe That's a bit of a cruel philosophy to take away, but.

That seems to be the case, unfortunately.

So, 1 of the reasons we're talking today is that a bunch of people requested that I do transcripts for this podcast and do captioning.

I used to make all kinds of YouTube videos and I would go on Upwork, I think,

I would hire folks to do transcription and it was always a pain in the ass, if I'm being honest.

And then I don't know how I discovered Rev, but when I did, it was this feeling of like, holy shit, somebody figured out how to do it just really easily.

I'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy.

There's so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful.

Then Rev, you just like, give the audio, give the video, you can actually give a YouTube link.

And then it comes back like a day later or 2 days later, whatever the hell it is with the captions, you know, all in a standardized format.

That was, I don't know, it was truly a joy.

So I thought I had, you know, just for the hell of it, talk to you.

1 other product, it just made my soul feel good.

1 other product I've used like that is for people who might be familiar is called iZotope RX.

That's another 1 where it was like, you just drop it.

I dropped into the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely.

All the stupid, like the mouth sounds and sometimes there's a background like sounds due to the malfunction of the equipment.

It has like automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put a bunch of effects.

I mean, it just, I don't know, everything else sucked for like voice-based cleanup that I've ever used.

I've used Audition, Adobe Audition, I've used all kinds of other things with plugins.

So that's another 1 in this whole pipeline that just brought joy to my heart.

Anyway, all that to say is, Rev put a smile to my face.

So can you maybe take a step back and say, what is Rev and how does it work?

We do have Rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later.

Do you have the actual domain or is it just a...

The actual domain, but we also use it kind of as a sub-brand.

So we use Rev.ai to denote our ASR services, right?

And Rev.com is kind of our more human and to the end user services.

So it's like WordPress.com and WordPress.org, they actually have separate brands that like, I don't know if you're familiar with what those are.

They provide almost like a separate branch of-

A little bit, I think with that, it's like WordPress.org is kind of their open source, right?

And WordPress.com is sort of their hosted commercial offering.

And with us, the differentiating is a little bit different, but maybe a similar idea.

Before I launch into what is Rev, I was gonna say, you know, like you were talking about Rev was music to your ears, your spiel was music to my ears, to us, the founders of Rev, because Rev was kind of founded to improve on the model of Upwork.

That was kind of the original, or part of their original impetus.

Like our CEO, Jason, was an early employee of Upwork.

So he's very familiar with their Upwork company.

And so he was very familiar with that model and he wanted to make the whole experience better because he knew like when you go at that time, Upwork was primarily programmers.

So the main thing they offered us, if you want to hire, you know, someone to help you code a little site, right.

You could go on Upwork, You could like browse through a list of freelancers, pick a programmer, have a contract with them and have them do some work.

But it was kind of a difficult experience because for you, you would kind of have to browse through all these people, right?

And you have to decide, okay, well, is this guy good?

And naturally, you're going to Upwork because you're not an expert, right?

If you're an expert, you probably wouldn't be getting a programmer from Upwork.

So there's a lot of potential regret, right?

And for the freelancer, it was also painful because half the time they spent not on actually doing the work, but kind of figuring out how can I make my profile most attractive to the buyer, right?

So like, our idea was, let's remove the barrier, right?

We'll pick a few verticals that are fairly standardizable.

Now, We actually started with translation, and then we added audio transcription a bit later.

You go, give us your files, we'll give you back the results as soon as possible.

Originally, maybe it was 48 hours, then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter.

And we'll hide all the details from you, right?

And like, that's kind of exactly what you're experiencing, right?

You don't need to worry about the details of how the sausage is made.

So you picked like a vertical, by vertical you mean basically a service.

Is Rev thinking of potentially going into other verticals in the future?

Or is this like the focus now is translation, transcription, like language?

The focus now is language or speech services generally, speech to text, language services.

You can kind of group them however you want.

But we originally, the categorization was work from home.

So work that was done by people on a computer, you know, we weren't trying to get into, you know, task rabbit type of things.

And something that could be relatively standard, not a lot of options.

So we could kind of present the simplified interface, right?

So programming wasn't a good fit, because each programming project is kind of unique.

We're looking for something that transcription is, you have 5 hours of audio, it's 5 hours of audio.

Translation is somewhat similar in that you can have a 5 page document, and then you just can price it by that.

We started with translation because we saw the need.

And we picked up kind of a specialty of translation where we would translate things like birth certificates, immigration documents, things like that.

And so they were fairly, even more well-defined and easy to kind of tell if we did a good job.

So you can literally charge per type of document?

Like how do you measure the effort involved in a particular thing?

So now, like for audio transcription, right, it's per audio unit.

For our translation, we don't really actually focus on that anymore, But back when it was still a main business of Revit, it was per page, right, or per word, depending on the kind of...

Because you can also do translation now on the audio, right?

So it would be both transcription and translation.

I wanted to test the system to see how good it is.

To see like how, well, is Russian supported?

So you start with English and then you can have subtitles in Russian.

Got it, because I'm deeply curious about this.

When COVID opens up a little bit, when the economy, when the world opens up a little bit.

First of all, I'm allergic to the word brand.

I'm definitely not building any brands in Russia.

But I'm going to Paris to talk to the translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

There's this famous couple that does translation.

And I'm more and more thinking of how is it possible to have a conversation with a Russian speaker because I have just some number of famous Russian speakers that I'm interested in talking to.

And my Russian is not strong enough to be witty and funny.

I'm an extra level of like awkward idiot in Russian, but I can understand it, right?

And I also like wonder how can I create a compelling English Russian experience for an English speaker?

Like if I there's a guy named Gregoriy Perlman, who's a mathematician, who obviously doesn't speak any English.

So I would probably incorporate like, a Russian translator into the picture.

And then it would be like a not to use a weird term, but like a 3, like A33 person thing where it's like a dance of like, I understand it 1 way, they don't understand the other way, but I'll be asking questions in English.

It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people.

1 of whom I'm confident is Vladimir Putin, I'm for sure talking to, I really want to make it happen because I think I could do a good job of it.

But the right, you know, understanding the fundamentals of translation is something I'm really interested in.

So that's why I'm starting with the actual translators of like Russian literature because they understand the nuance and the beauty of the language

But I also want to see like in speech, how can we do it in real time?

So That's like a little bit of a baby project that I hope to push forward.

So just to share, my dad actually does translation.

That was kind of always his, not a hobby, but he had a job, like a day job, but his passion was always writing poetry.

And then we get to America, and he started also translating.

First, he was translating English poetry to Russian.

He kind of gained some small fame in that world anyways, because recently this poet, like Lewis Cluck, I don't know if you know of, some American poet, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

And so my dad had translated 1 of her books of poetry into Russian.

He was like 1 of the few, so they asked him and gave an interview to Radios Voboda, if you know what that is.

And he talked about some of the intricacies of translating poetry.

So that's like an extra level of difficulty, right?

Because translating poetry is even more challenging than translating just, you know, interviews.

Do you remember any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation that Stig got to, like something he's talked about?

I mean, a lot of it, I think, is word choice, right?

The way Russian is structured is first of all, quite different than the way English is structured, right?

Just there is inflections in Russian and genders and they don't exist in English.

That's 1 of the reasons actually why machine translation is quite difficult for English to Russian and Russian to English because they're such different languages.

But then English has like a huge number of words, many more than Russian actually, I think.

So it's often difficult to find the right word to convey the same emotional meaning.

Yeah, Russian language, they play with words much more.

So you were mentioning that Rev was kind of born out of trying to take a vertical on Upwork and then standardize it.

So- We're just trying to make the freelancer marketplace idea better, right?

Better for both customers and better for the freelancers themselves.

Is there something else to the story of finding Rev?

Like what did it take to bring it actually to life?

I mean, as often the case, it's with scaling it up, right?

And in this case, you know, the scaling is kind of scaling the marketplace, so to speak, right?

Rev is essentially a two-sided marketplace, right?

Because there's the customers, and then there's the reverse.

If there's not enough reverse, the reverse is what we call our freelancers.

If there's not enough reverse, then customers have a bad experience.

Takes longer to get your work done, things like that.

If there's too many, then the drivers have a bad experience because they might log on to see what work is available and there's not very much work.

So kind of keeping that balance is a quite challenging problem.

And that's like a problem we've been working on for many years.

We're still like refining our methods, right?

I did a bunch of different psychology experiments on Mechanical Turk, for example.

I've asked to do different kinds of very tricky computer vision annotation on Mechanical Turk and it's connecting people in a more systematized way.

I would say, you know, between task and, what would you call that, worker, is what Mechanical Turk calls it.

What do you think about this world of gig economies, of there being a service that connects customers to workers in a way that's like massively distributed, like potentially scaling to, it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people, right?

Is there something interesting about that world that you can speak to?

Yeah, well, we don't think of it as kind of gig economy.

Like to some degree, I don't like the word gig that much, because to some degree it diminishes the work being done, right?

It sounds kind of like almost amateurish.

Well, maybe in like music industry, like gig is the standard term, but in work, it kind of sounds like, oh, it's, it's, it's frivolous.

To us, it's, improving the nature of working from home on your own time and on your own terms, right.

And kind of taking away geographical limitations and time limitations.

So, you know, many of our freelancers are maybe work from home moms, right.

Just don't want the traditional 9 to 5 job, but they wanna make some income.

And Rev kinda allows them to do that and decide exactly how much to work and when to work.

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151