When limited to a single word or a short phrase, it sounded just like the real thing. In a demo, Mason showed me how he could type into a voice actress’s existing transcript to synthesize new audio that matched her voice. Overdub is supposed to address the biggest missing piece in Descript’s “word processor for audio” concept, letting users generate new words in addition to just deleting or shuffling existing ones.

This turned out to be pretty useful for podcast editing, which is now the main application for Descript’s Windows and Mac software. Delete a stray word or jumbled sentence from the transcript, for instance, and it will vanish from the audio recording as well. In the process of creating audio tours, Detour built its own tools that would let editors modify audio by editing a speech-to-text transcript. Mason, who cofounded Groupon more than a decade ago, created Descript in 2017 as a spinoff from his previous startup, an audio tour app called Detour. “This just really opens it up for people to be able to make editorial corrections on the fly that generally sound really good and usable.” Typing in audio “The idea here is really to save people a trip back to the recording booth, which is such a pain if you’re doing any kind of recording,” says Andrew Mason, Descript’s CEO.

Descript is looking for podcasters, YouTubers, audiobook creators, and other audio pros to help test the new feature, which is supposed to help save time and money on rerecording.

The podcast production startup has launched a private beta test for a feature called “Overdub,” which can use audio samples of a person’s voice to generate new words or phrases.

Use deepfake app