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From Dishwashing Robots to AI Storytelling: Matt Mireles' Entrepreneurial Journey
146 Plays6 months ago
In the latest episode of Marketing Spark, host Mark Evans sits down with Matt Mireles, CEO and co-founder of Talktastic.
They dive into the transformative impact of AI on content marketing, exploring how generative AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping the industry.
Matt shares his entrepreneurial journey, from being a paramedic and journalist to founding AI-driven companies.
He discusses Talktastic's innovative new app that transforms rambling speech into polished writing, maintaining the user's authentic voice.
The conversation also delves into the ethical considerations of AI in content creation and the future of AI as a tool for enhancing human communication.
This episode provides valuable insights for marketers on integrating AI effectively while preserving creativity and authenticity.
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Transcript
Introduction to B2B and SaaS Marketing Trends
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Spark, where we explore the latest trends, strategies, and challenges facing B2B and SaaS
AI's Impact on Content Marketing
00:00:15
Speaker
marketers. In this episode, I'm focused on the fascinating and volatile content marketing landscape amid the emergence of generative AI platforms like chatGBT, Perplexity, Clod, and Meta. As AI continues to disrupt various industries, content marketing is no exception. AI is reshaping how we create and distribute content. But with these opportunities come new challenges and
Challenges of Maintaining Human Touch in AI Marketing
00:00:39
Speaker
questions. For example, how can marketers harness the power of AI without losing the human touch? How do we ensure that AI-generated content remains unique and engaging?
Insights from Matt Morelos on Integrating AI
00:00:48
Speaker
And today, I'm excited to talk with someone at the heart of this AI-driven transformation. Matt Morelos is the CEO and co-founder of Talktastic, an AI-focused lab tackling the problem of human communication. Matt's expertise and experience will provide great insights into how businesses can effectively integrate AI into their content strategies to stay ahead of the curve.
Automating Conversations with Lambot
00:01:10
Speaker
Before we jump into the conversation, here's a message from my newest sponsor, Lambot. In building my business, I've come to an important realization. Certain tools can be enjoyable and valuable for your prospects. I'm excited to talk about Lambot, the AI chatbot generator. With the help of AI, you can easily automate fun, friendly, and flexible conversations. Engage your leads, answer repetitive questions, or provide a round-the-clock customer service on your website, WhatsApp,
00:01:39
Speaker
Facebook Messenger, or any of your customers' favorite channels. The chatbots are super easy to design for non-technical people. I created mine in 15 minutes and could instantly deploy it on my website. If you want a hassle-free and intuitive AI chatbot that your customers will love, head to lambot.io forward slash try, or follow the link in the podcast description to sign up and create yours for free. All right, back to the show.
Matt Morelos' Entrepreneurial Journey
00:02:08
Speaker
Matt, welcome to Marketing Spark. Great to be here. Let's start by talking about your entrepreneurial journey and the stories of Talktastic. I ah talked to you before the podcast and there are some interesting backstories. You're a venture capitalist and previously founded a startup that made dishwashing robots for restaurants.
00:02:28
Speaker
You've also been a paramedic in the Bronx and a reporter from the New York Times. Can you talk about your journey and get into what's going on with Tautastic? I understand that you're on the verge of launching a new and really interesting AI application. Thanks for that intro. i I probably shouldn't be here as an entrepreneur, like statistically. When I was in high school, my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to do. for as a career and I said I wanted to write the great American novel. She said that wasn't a career. In my 20s, I dropped out of Berkeley a couple times, fought forest fires in Montana, was an EMT in South Central LA, and I moved into New York City, worked as a 9-1 paramedic in the South Bronx in Harlem, back to school, paid my way through college, and throughout most of my college experience, I was planning on being a journalist. I won some awards, I worked for the New York Times, Newsweek as a writer, photographer, sort of making video multimedia and doing multimedia storytelling. And I was in love with the idea of how we could use the internet and technology to tell stories in ways that were never possible before. And ah pretty quickly, I hit a ceiling in the old world, the the old media world of magazines and newspapers, because I wanted to actually invent new things. So after
00:03:55
Speaker
Finally graduated college at Columbia University in 2008. I did a summer program and mini MBA for idiots at the Stanford Business School. I got exposed to Silicon Valley and startups and I said, this is for me. um And at the time I had an idea where I wanted to make it easier for people to understand video and consume video
Enhancing Communication with AI
00:04:20
Speaker
ah faster and more like reading. I started a company called Speaker Text. And at the time we're doing a little bit of AI or what you call machine learning or pick your label and a lot of humans to transcribe video, make it interactive, make it shareable, searchable.
00:04:37
Speaker
And that ended up getting me down this path ah as an entrepreneur. And it's funny, we sold that company in 2012 after raising a million bucks or so from Google and some other investors, which was a lot of money back then and still is a lot of money. And I've started a few companies in between. can be called Dishcraft Robotics, making dishwashing robots for restaurants, sells a service, has gone on and raised $50 million dollars plus, and invested in in in a few startups. And then in 2019, I co-founded Oasis with my co-founder, Yusef, who had done some bleeding-edge research in deepfake video detection, when it was very nascent-filled. and And we built the first AI to detect deepfake videos.
00:05:25
Speaker
back in 2018.
Developing AI Tools for Hardware Integration
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Speaker
And from that experience, we said, hey, everyone thinks about this technology as they look at the bad, the bad side of of deepfakes and how it can potentially harm society. But as we dug in, we realized, wow, we could actually help people communicate. more effectively than is really possible with mo you or any existing technology. If you have AI as a medium through which you communicate with other people, instead of losing information in that process of communication, you could actually enrich and expand that information. Rather than compressing and having this lossy compression, you could have this like super resolution of human communication.
00:06:14
Speaker
and That was a crazy journey. We started off doing deep fake video chat through ai avatars. We built the first AI models that could generate video in real time on iPhones. And then we learned that it's possible to physically melt ah the iPhone app. i was In 2021, I was demoing this app to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Call was going great at the three-minute mark. I was talking about potentially and if investing a lot of money in the company. and And then at the nine-minute mark, he started complaining and his hand was burning. And and that was the last thing I heard before his phone crashed. And this has actually happened up and down Sand Hill Road, where we crashed people's phones and we discovered we're actually physically melting phones and had to go to Apple.
00:07:02
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and say, hey, we've built software that physically melts the iPhone and and damages it, and that that's not good. That was that was a whole adventure.
Breakthroughs in Speech Recognition with Talktastic
00:07:11
Speaker
I don't plan on abusing our software to QA their hardware, because no one had ever tried to do this, kind of push the on-device computing on the iPhone in such a way. But we there's a lot of reasons why that sort of product didn't work, but we were still always had this idea of how do we help people communicate. how do we solve this fundamental problem of human communication? Because it's what we do all day every day is we try to communicate, we try to understand each other. And we're better at it than any other species that we know of. But in general, we're terrible at it. We suck at it. We constantly screw it up, whether it's our personal lives, our professional lives. And we still have this insight of
00:07:53
Speaker
AI can actually make us better at telling our story. In the beginning of last year, in 2023, we pivoted the company, a little side project that we built. We just talk and ramble and it transcribes what you say and then rewrites it in a bunch of different formats, more cleaned up. And that was just a little side project that just blew up unexpectedly. We pivoted the company to focus on that. We launched that in April, 2023. We invented the category of turn your rambling speech into polished writing. And there's since been, now there's a bunch of these apps. Now over the next couple of weeks, we're going to be launching Talktastic and sort of rebranding the whole company to Talktastic. And this is a desktop app that is really represents a fundamental breakthrough in speech recognition and does things that
00:08:46
Speaker
have never been possible before and no one's ever really tried to do before. And what it does is it works by understanding the context of what you're doing on your computer. So you can be in any app on your computer or you press a button and TalkTastic takes a snapshot of the app that you're in, understands the context, understands who you're trying to talk to, what questions you're being asked. And then as you talk, it does this contextual understanding. And then as soon as you're done talking, it's also transcribing in real time. And then it auto-corrects any errors from the speech recognition system. like Let's say you have so a friend whose name could be spelled many different ways correctly. My co-founder's name is Yousif. There's five to seven different spellings of Yousif that are correct.
00:09:39
Speaker
um by looking at the screen and saying, oh, you're actually talking to you. Then probably this is how you you spell his name. And then also rewriting what you say to fit the context, to do the formatting and for clarity, but while still maintaining your sense of authentic voice. And it's incredibly fast. And it doesn't melt the iPhones I take it? It doesn't, it doesn't melt your phone. It's a desktop app. We're going to be launching it in the next couple of weeks. And it's, I've never seen anything remotely like it that is so fast, accurate, good. That's something we've been working on for many months now. I'm really proud of it. Great.
AI: Replacement or Enhancement of Creativity?
00:10:18
Speaker
We'll add a link to the, to TalkTastic and the show notes. I have a bunch of questions I wanted to ask you about the impact of AI and content marketing, but maybe a little bit of a side conversation here. I was at a technology meetup last night. It was all about AI. One of the presentations featured
00:10:37
Speaker
two guys from an ad agency talking about the impact of AI on creativity and whether AI was gonna kill creativity, replace humans as a creative catalyst. And it was interesting because one ah one of them said, yes, AI will replace humans when it comes to creativity. And the other one said, no. Where do you you sit in terms of that question? Cause increasingly it feels like AI will be able to do this, but not yet. Like the yet is a big part of the future or at least how people feel about the future when it comes to AI. It does a lot of wonderful things right now. People suggest, for example, that it's great at aggregating information, but not great at insight yet. It's really great at creative ideas, but not totally creative yet. Curious as a content creator.
00:11:37
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Do you have any thoughts on the creative future of AI versus humans? I prefer the word storyteller and One of the things I've learned after, geez, 16 years in the field of AI is that a lot of people think of AI as something new and different. And it is, but there's, if you think of it like a human and, and okay, what can we do with the smarter humans in our life? If you are a professional storyteller,
00:12:18
Speaker
You jam with other people. You talk about stories. If you want to up your game as a storyteller, you hang out with other really talented storytellers. You talk about ideas, and it's generative. And it's not and just because someone's a, quote, better storyteller than you, it doesn't ah you end up learning from them. You end up growing. My oldest brother was one of the top rock climbers in the country when I was a little kid. And my sister got into rock climbing. And then very quickly she became one of the top female rock climbers in in the United States because she ended up hanging out with my brother and all his super talented friends. And her trajectory of growth just accelerated. And I think that's what like that's how you should think about AI.
00:13:08
Speaker
That's how people, storytellers, okay, what if you had access to super talented people around you, and how can you use these things to to make us better? It's not about competition, per se. There is some of that, right? There is some aspect of this that is zero sum, but fundamentally, you're not going to lose your job to AI. Most likely, you're probably going to lose your job to someone who else who's using AI better and smarter than you. And it's very interesting. I have a 12 year old son and watching him use these tools and seeing how he uses chat GPT to enhance his own creativity. He has no
00:14:02
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pretense of what a world was like before this. He doesn't assume that this is some violation of the godly order. He's, oh cool, I have some ideas and I can talk to this
Transformation of Content Marketing through AI
00:14:14
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robot that's gonna give me ideas. And it's incredible the things that that he comes up with. Inventing new kinds of tennis. What if you added extra rows to the to a chess board and had new pieces? I think as humans, we are tool makers. That's what that's this hand, these hands, this is, there's two things that make us human. Okay. It's language. It's our ability to communicate and the hand, the opposable thumb. This is the big, this is the big unlock of home. And this hand is not that useful for doing most things, but what it's useful for is as an intermediary, intermediate interface for all the tools that we build. Right.
00:15:00
Speaker
We live in a house, we talk about building with your hands, but you actually picked up tools with hands and it built it built the house. And computers are tools, or at least the vision of the future that we're pursuing, that I'm pursuing, you know, there's there's one version of AI, which is let's turn computers, let's turn machines into gods. I really think of Talktastic and my career as going saying, hey, we're going to take the opposite end of that bet. We're going to create Superman. We're going to create Transcendent Man, as opposed to try to just have the machines become gods and replace us. That is one of the great questions of this era, is where will we go? Will we be replaced by these machine gods, or will or will we become as gods ourselves through the machines? and I'm betting on that latter vision. And I think that as a human,
00:16:01
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Given that the state of uncertainty that we don't know what the future is going to hold, we have to make bets and take gambles. And I think betting that, hey, these things are going to make us better, stronger.
00:16:14
Speaker
That's the, that's a good bet. And it's what's been shown historically. And it's also very empowering, I think for people. If they see, Hey, actually this didn't help me level up my game as opposed to it's seeing AI as an opportunity as opposed to a threat is the way. Yeah. It's been about just over 18 months since open AI launched chat GPT and the content marketing landscape was thrown into disarray. Well, it's happened in a short period of time. A couple of questions here. One is your take on how much content marketing has been transformed for good, better or worse. And as a storyteller, as a creator, what do you think are the biggest challenges that marketers face when integrating AI into their content marketing?
00:17:09
Speaker
strategies and and tactics. Very loaded questions, but I think we're at a time, a juncture in which we're just trying to get our heads around where we're at and where we're going. Maybe a
Building Relationships in the AI Era
00:17:23
Speaker
little bit of reflection on those two questions about the transformation of content marketing and some of the challenges facing marketers. It's a hard time. For a long time, search was growing. and search was a growing market and you could create, you could tell stories that would be found by search engines and it would become useful content. Now, and that's the era of 10 blue links where you go to Google, you get 10 blue links and you want to be one of those 10 blue links. Now, 95% of my Googling has been replaced by perplexity.
00:18:01
Speaker
where I'm not doing the AIs doing the Googling and I'm getting answers. Sometimes I click through to to the sources. what's really but That's just beginning or the early part of the wave. and what As someone who got my start looking at the kind of newspaper industry, getting its ass handed to it by the Internet, I became very very aware and village vigilant about thinking how do we skate to where the puck is going, not where the puck is? And I think what's hard about that is all the money is still in the old way of doing things. No one has figured out where the money is in in the new way. I'm just riffing out loud here, but thinking first principles, in the newspaper era,
00:18:59
Speaker
the byline, the author didn't matter. You were supposed to be faceless and just give information. And that that got commoditized. Information got commoditized. Takes, opinion became more valuable because it was unique. I think that that trend is gonna continue because if you're just creating content that is informational, It is commoditized and it will be rewritten and ingested by models and and the value of it will just decline very rapidly. But sorting through the noise, having an opinion that's interesting, having a voice like yourself, having a relationship with people in a world where information is abundant, human relationships actually become scarce and valuable. And I think that
00:19:57
Speaker
There's so much information. There's so much content. It's gonna be hard. if you I don't see how you win. in And if you're just information, I think you have to build relationships with people and relationships are what's gonna
Creating Unique Content in a Saturated Market
00:20:11
Speaker
win. And that's hard to outsource. That's hard because ah you have to be different. You have to be authentic. You have to be interesting. You have to have a point of view. You have to stand for something. That's different than putting useful information on the internet. yeah I have talked a lot recently about the return of what I call people-powered marketing and sales. For the last 15 years, data and dashboards have guided marketers. Green arrows are good, red arrows are bad, and they implement a series of hacks and optimizations to generate better results. And I think what we've lost as marketers is the
00:20:56
Speaker
willingness or the appetite to talk to customers and prospect and make connections, because especially in B2B and SaaS is that it's all about relationships. I always throw back to the adage that people buy from, people don't buy from companies, especially and when it comes to B2B and SaaS. but I think you I agree with you. I think that relationships and personality make a difference and will help you differentiate you. And that stands in contrast to the future of content. For many years, content was king. And a lot of companies leaned hard into content and it worked for them. But what I'm concerned about is AI makes it easy to create content at scale. For now, a lot of that content is very generic. Vanilla ice cream in a world of Ben and Jerry's. The question for people like you and I, how do we as storytellers and creators develop
00:21:54
Speaker
unique, high quality, insightful, interesting, engaging content as one thing we need to do, but also the ability to get it in front of the people that matter to us. There's a production challenge, but there's also a distribution challenge. Does AI help us
AI's Impact on Authentic Storytelling
00:22:16
Speaker
do that? Does AI make that increasingly challenging? Should I be, ah optimistic as a content creator or pessimistic, there's a lot of sort of big questions that we're in the midst of. Very philosophical, that's the world in which we live. In a world where anyone can create filler, generic content, authenticity really wins. And authenticity is it's special and valuable.
00:22:49
Speaker
And again, that's why we talk about content, but it's like, how do you get people's attention? You can have big flashy things, but being human, being authentic, people are attracted to that. That's something that I personally think a lot about, is how do we create and build AI systems that actually allow us to be more authentic? and that don't make us sound generic. Don't take our ideas and make them sound boilerplate unlike everyone else, but actually how do we magnify the office the authenticity, magnify what's unique and human about us. Honestly, that's a lot of what I've spent the last six months working on with Talktastic is, you know, how do we actually make, how do we
00:23:45
Speaker
make what you say help you be more clear without making you just sound generic. Because if I look critically at the kind of first version of Oasis that we shipped with the previous generation product, you'd talk and ramble on it. It would take what you say and make a professional email or blog post. But it didn't do a great job of of capturing your voice. It stripped out your voice. but it was like an Instagram filter that was like too strong, like you lost your identity. And that's a problem we've worked really hard to try to solve. And I think with Talktastic, we've made some real strides in that. Because I do think that anybody can sound like Chad GPT. How do you sound like you and how do you communicate in a way that's authentic, but that removes the effort of communicating?
00:24:45
Speaker
right If you're a writer, if you're a creator, you spend a lot of time thinking about, how do I sound? How do I say this? How do I how like how do i tell the story in a way that that gets people's attention and that creates an emotional experience or psychic experience for for the other person? and That's a lot of work to wordsmith that and to make it for most people. and That's something where I think AI, AI can really help us. Now in my ideal world, you, it's almost like neural link without the wires. You have the thoughts, you talk them through, you think them through, but then the work of actually.
00:25:30
Speaker
Formatting them or writing them for a LinkedIn or Twitter or what have you that solved now that said there is something to The act of writing and putting things into words that actually helps you think through The thoughts and ideas and battle test them. That's something I also think about is how do we make sure? That we're actually helping people think through their thoughts. And the
Ethical Considerations in AI Content Creation
00:25:58
Speaker
act of writing has value. It's hard, but some of that hardness actually is important. um A lot to unpack there. I will say that ah around your last point, I'm an externalist. I
00:26:15
Speaker
spend a lot of time taking notes. And I still take notes like pen to paper, taking notes, I just find that the link between my brain and my hand and paper, there's just a different type of connection when it comes to that kind of exercise and really allowing your ideas to flow through onto the paper. The other thing I think about when to go when you're about your comment, when it comes to authenticity, is around the idea of videos and podcasts, which are conversations featuring us as people, where we can, our storytelling takes on a different context. And I think that's why I think video is a very exciting place to be these days, why by podcasts are continuing to gain ground. So lots and lots of time to think about there. I guess one of the things that I'm
00:27:06
Speaker
Well, let me just, as a disclaimer, maybe before we get going, one thing I should say as a disclaimer is that I am a user of Oasis. I love the way that it can allow me to, in a very spontaneous and proactive and reactive way, turn my words into content and have them come out as my voice. It sounds like me as opposed to chat GPT. So I will say that the other thing I will, the other thing I will let as another disclaimer is that the reason that Matt and I are talking today, or one of the reasons is that when I signed up for Oasis, I got an email, one of these onboarding emails that you get from every SAS company. And in it, Matt said.
00:27:52
Speaker
If you want to talk to me, I'm happy to do it. Here's my calendar link for a 15 minute conversation. I thought this is a pretty cool guy doing a pretty cool thing. So I booked the time. When we jumped on the call, I asked Matt whether this is something a lot of people took advantage of. And he said, no, I was one of the few people to do it, which is a very good marketing hack. When you think about it, making yourself accessible. I just wanted to make that clear about our relationship and and my experience with Oasis. Getting back to our regular programming, one of the things that I did want to talk to you about in maybe wrapping up this conversation is around the ethical considerations that marketers should keep in mind when they're using AI for content creation. We've talked about authenticity. We've talked about having the power of your own voice. Do you think about ethics and what are your thoughts in terms of philosophically how marketers should approach AI when they're developing content?
Exploring AI as a Communication Medium
00:28:50
Speaker
At the end of the day, everyone has a choice. Do you want, are you going to, are you going to tell the truth? Are you trying to tell the truth more clearly or are you trying to deceive? And really that's the, to me, that's the, the core question that any, anybody telling a story or marketer needs to ask is if you're trying to tell the truth, you're trying to understand things, then there's a duty of checking the work and making sure that things are actually accurate, especially if you're going to give big canonical statements. If you care about your customers, if you care about being honest, then you should follow that. and
00:29:35
Speaker
make sure that you do a good job. You're giving people information and it should be good and it should be useful. If you don't, I don't really have much for you, but that's these are not new problems. With AI, there's potentially questions around copyright, ah around like fair use. The courts have not decided on that. I have a feeling that a lot, most of what people complain about, it'll end up being fair use. But these are very difficult technical questions. You have books on your shelf behind you. You have learned from them and you apply those learnings and you borrow them in your future work. It's not what AI does. It looks reads, it looks at pictures, it learns. I think that's fair use. But
00:30:27
Speaker
It depends also on the specifics of the model. and I think the courts will end up deciding this, that specific class of issue. Was there a specific aspect ah of ethics and morality that that you were thinking of as you said that? I guess nothing is really original. We're we're reinventing what's already happened in the past, but I think it comes down to whether it's your work or whether it's the work of many people that have been mashed together by generative AI. I think that's where I'm coming from because I think ah a lot of writing right now is people are positioning themselves as the authors of that content, but really, they're really aggregators of content as opposed to anything else. And that's, I think, the biggest ethical issue that I think about these days.
00:31:24
Speaker
Just like people gone, Hey, chat to the team, write write me an article about blah. It's the robot doing it. One final question that I wanted to ask you is if you're a CEO or a marketing leader and and content is a big part of your go to market strategy, what advice would you give these people in terms of. incorporating AI into their content marketing strategies because obviously if you believe in content as a way to engage, educate, and you know entertain customers, then you'll definitely want to take advantage of AI, but you want to do it in a very smart, purposeful way. So what would you tell a CEO or a marketing leader who wants to jump on the AI bandwagon but wants to do it in the right way? i would say
00:32:19
Speaker
Find people who love telling stories and are obsessed with these technologies. Find people if you have to lecture people and push them to use AI to be better storytellers. And you probably need different people because I don't think those people are, they're not going to make it. Mm-hmm. And maintaining perspective around what is your brand? What kind of stories do you want to tell? Steve Jobs has this great talk. He talks about how marketing is about values. What do you stand for in this noisy world out there?
00:33:04
Speaker
That doesn't change, right? The methods change. We went from cave paintings to the written word, to oil paintings, to photographs, and then television and pictures and radio and podcasts and the internet. The mediums change. And AI, ultimately, I believe, will be a new well in The arc of history, AI will be actually seen as a new medium of human communication, not just something that turns you know text into text or speech into text or text into video or images, but actually will be a new medium that sits above language. But that's gonna play out over years. I have to say, use the technology. There's so much potential, there's so much possibility, and no one really knows what the hell they're doing. yeah
00:34:02
Speaker
it' It's all undiscovered country and that's amazing. Go explore
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:34:06
Speaker
the frontier, make something awesome. Yeah. Well, it feels, it feels very much like when the web first emerged and the possibilities were endless. So fascinating time, fascinating conversation about the use of technology, the ethical considerations and and where we're going. Where can people learn more about you and TalkTastic? Our website is talktastic dot.com. We are, I'm on Twitter at Matt Morellis, M-A-T-M-I-R-E-L-E-S. Talk to us on Twitter at Talktastic AI. I'd love to have people ah hit me up and try out the product. Hopefully by the time this podcast is live, we will start opening up invites to the public data.
00:34:56
Speaker
Sounds great. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. And thanks to everyone for listening to the Marketing Spark podcast. If you're a B2B SaaS company with one to $10 million dollars in revenue, looking for strategic and tactical expertise and experience to jumpstart your marketing or scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor. You can reach out to me via email, mark at markevans.ca, connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co.