Joshua Xu is the Co-Founder and CEO at HeyGen a platform that allows users to effortlessly produce studio-quality videos with AI-generated avatars and voices.
You co-founded HeyGen in 2020 with the vision of reinventing visual storytelling through AI. Are you able to share what inspired you to begin HeyGen and your initial vision for this mission?
Prior to founding HeyGen, I worked on Snap’s promoting team, where I spearheaded the combination of AI into the Snapchat platform. In a while, I switched teams to work on the AI-augmented camera. It was 2018, and AI didn’t generate as much attention then because it does now, but our team worked hard to create items for images and videos using AI that didn’t exist then. It was then that I spotted the pc can create high-quality and realistic videos. I became excited concerning the potential of this technology and the way it could entirely change how people make content.
Latest content platforms have revolutionized the introduction of the mobile camera. We’ve seen Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other content platforms emerge and unlock a brand new way for content creators to create personalized, quality content. But even with the assistance of a mobile camera, there are still barriers to creating first-class content. A number of the barriers I experienced included: on-camera skills, the time and resources needed to record videos, and high production costs.
At HeyGen, we consider that the camera is replaceable. I grew my profession within the mobile camera space, where I worked on software and technology to make it easier for people to create content. But that audience still struggles to create quality content solely using mobile cameras. Our team at HeyGen feels that if we are able to replace the camera, it implies that we are able to remove the barrier to visual storytelling and content creation, which supplies us a step ahead.
Are you able to discuss the challenges HeyGen faced in its early stages and the way the team overcame them to attain profitability and rapid growth?
Since consumers are still latest to the generative AI industry, they’ve many questions surrounding HeyGen’s ethical policy. We wish to reiterate that HeyGen’s policies and products strictly prohibit the creation of unauthorized content, and we take the abuse of our platform extremely seriously.
Our security safeguards include advanced user verification, including live video consent, dynamic verbal passcodes, and rapid human review of all avatar verifications. To our knowledge, no misuse has occurred since implementing these protocols. Trust & Safety are critical to our business, and we’re actively partnering across the industry to proceed developing the tools and best practices obligatory to combat misinformation and AI misuse.
How does HeyGen’s AI technology enable businesses to create videos 10 times faster and with less overhead?
After I began HeyGen, I learned that editing videos isn’t costly, but hiring a video production team is. Because we live in a video-first world, businesses want to have interaction their audiences using video content but are held back by the fee and complexity of video production. HeyGen helps firms generate professional-grade videos, complete with text-to-speech AI avatars that narrate those videos from scratch. With HeyGen’s video generation, you don’t need a studio, forged, or specialized skills to create videos for your online business.
When businesses nix hiring film crews – buying expensive equipment, coping with finicky actors, taxing re-shoots, and pesky post-production editing – HeyGen users create videos 10x faster. It’s saving teams money and time and making it easier to scale up the content that impacts their bottom lines.
The flexibility to localize videos into 175+ languages and dialects is impressive. Are you able to explain how HeyGen achieves this and maintains natural lip sync and voice quality?
Our team at HeyGen uses text-to-speech technology. Which means that HeyGen converts the text that you just write into audio files. We focused on making video generation video quality above our threshold, and we wish to assist people replace the actual camera and scale the content production process.
With over 40,000 paying customers, what industries or forms of businesses are you seeing essentially the most adoption from?
HeyGen helps our greater than 40,000+ customers do three things: create, localize, and personalize videos without the additional costs that involve hiring a production company. Our software is gaining popularity amongst marketing teams, where we’re definitely seeing an increase in localization.
McDonald’s and The Weather Channel are amongst your notable clients. Are you able to share more details about these collaborations and the outcomes they achieved using HeyGen?
The “Sweet Connections” McDonald’s campaign was exciting for our team. It highlighted HeyGen’s technology, particularly our translation feature. Grandchildren recorded a message of their grandmother’s native language with our Video Translate technology. It showed the world that AI is for everybody, including grandmothers and their grandchildren.
We also partnered with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on a world project for its latest Weather Kids campaign, created in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and The Weather Channel. The campaign was a part of UNDP’s efforts to spice up awareness of climate change’s impacts and mobilize people worldwide to take meaningful climate motion for future generations. Viewers could watch the 2050 forecast delivered by Weather Kids: a special forecast from the 12 months 2050 anchored by kid meteorologists powered by HeyGen.
The sector of AI video generation is rapidly evolving. What future applications or advancements in AI video technology do you foresee, and the way is HeyGen positioning itself for these?
If people can generate engaging video content, they’ll naturally create more videos, and each business goals to extend its video output in today’s video-first world. For HeyGen, we see ourselves creating personalized videos for all of our customers using a full-body avatar.
How do you envision the role of AI within the broader field of digital storytelling and content creation evolving over the subsequent five years?
There are numerous possibilities on the market. People can now assemble footage and use AI-driven editing to create a refined video. If we proceed on a path forward with generative AI, we are able to advance technology and significantly enhance performance. This might eventually result in experiencing the outcomes of generative AI creation within the streaming space.
How will AI video generation eventually disrupt the film industry?
While HeyGen makes a speciality of tailoring custom videos for businesses, we consider that compelling, high-quality content will be created even with out a mobile camera.
Relating to the creative arts, AI is definitely going to disrupt the film industry. While this just isn’t HeyGen’s focus, imagine a world where people localize a video. This approach could involve leveraging generative AI as a substitute of incurring additional costs on reshoots.
HeyGen recently successfully raised a $60M Series A funding, how will this impact the corporate’s future plans?
Since our business has been profitable since Q2 of 2023, our Series A funding round was primarily focused on bringing world-class advisors and investors to assist us scale. It can also help us speed up our product roadmap and expand the expansion of market teams based in LA, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Toronto.
