elevenlabs on S Anand

MGR via ElevenLabs

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:31:33 +0800

I was watching Vaa Vaathiyar which has a short clip of MGR speaking. It’s either AI-generated or mimic-ed and it wasn’t bad.

I used ffmpeg to record the audio from the film, transcribed it via Gemini 3 Pro on AI Studio with the prompt:

Transcribe this into Tamil

… which gave me:

ராமு… என்ன செய்திருக்கிறாய் நீ… வாத்தியார் கேட்கிறேன் சொல் நிமிர்ந்து பார்க்க கூட தைரியம் இல்லையா… ஓடாதே… நில்…

Translation:

Ramu… What have you done… Vaathiyar (MGR) is asking, tell me Don’t you have the courage to stand up and look at me… Don’t run… stop…

(GitHub Copilot’s auto-complete translated the above for me as I typed - flawlessly. It’s getting better by the day!)

Then, I used yt-dlp to download the audio from this MGR Short Clip.

Here’s the sample:

I fed this into ElevenLabs’ Instant Voice Clone that needs just 10 seconds of audio and created an “MGR” voice.

Here’s the same dialogue in the cloned voice:

Personally, I think the ElevenLabs version is slightly better. Of course, given the pace of AI improvement, this might just be the impact of a new model release.

2 Apr 2026: Here’s the non-cloned generation from Sarvam’s text to speech with Bulbul v3 standard quality. It feels pretty weak.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview TTS gave me this, which feels much better.

Things I Learned - 14 Jul 2024

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Carlton’s TDS session
- Always create a new venv via VS Code when starting a training session. Helps reproduce issues (though I could use Colab instead)
- Create an empty .ipynb notebook and double-click it. That’s another way (though slower) to open a Jupyter notebook
Share Parrish Knowledge Project podcast. Three generations of wealth
- There is a big difference between liking animals and being a vet. Between liking education and being a teacher.
- Even if no one reads your writing, you benefit from the writing.
- Emotional.crises like 9/11 or Covid are far easier for markets to recover from
Hidden brain podcast. White trying to hard can back fire on you
- Sometimes conscious thinking makes our automated responses of sports music, dance are great examples
- Instead, SURRENDER to something outside of you. Like playing with kids. Exercise also sends blood away from brain. Drugs. ChatGPT.
- It’s called Ue in Chinese philosophy
A quick check on the pricing of text to speech models
- OpenAI TTS: $15/1M chars Ref
- Deepgram Aura: $15/1M chars Ref
- Elevenlabs Scale: $165/1M chars Ref
- Google TTS Neural2: $16/1M chars Ref
- Azure AI Speech: $15/1M chars Ref
- AWS Polly Neural TTS: $16/1M chars Ref

Things I Learned - 21 Jan 2024

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

When comparing Mistral with 4b quantization vs unquantized:
- 2 responses were significantly shorter and fairly different
- 1 was identical
- 1 was almost identical but shorter by a few words
- 1 was slightly longer and fairly different
#PREDICTION As humans have more conversations with LLMs, they will replace video watching and interactive gaming with conversation based role play. New game genres will evolve
Lilac is an LLM-based data curation tool. Use it to search by concept (e.g. PII, duplicates, etc.) and then drop/update the results.
Lungs have a Hausdorff dimension of 2.97 – giving them one of the highest surface area to volume ratio. Brains are 2.8. Sierpinski Pyramid is exactly 2 – which is weird. To solid-paint twice the size, you need 4 times as much paint.
How I write podcast. Tim Ferriss
- High bars are constraints. I set the strongest constraints against the scarcest resources. Like reputation
- Being a category of one is more defensible than a competitive advantage
- Content always beats presentation. When in doubt, push for more interesting content
- Regular publishing improves thinking
- To build a habit, do less than you think you can do. That makes it easier to build momentum on the habit and sustain during crunch times
- There is a lot of mediocrity in the world. If you’re doing something (in a winner take all ecosystem), be the best.
- Top lawyers are exceptional proofreaders. They are able to see what is unclair, and what is redundant, and what has loop holes very quickly.
- Forcing yourself to cut down from a thousand words to 200 to a paragraph to a sentence takes you through a phase transition where you discover something unexpected
- The more outrageous the question, the more likely it is to be useful in generating a new perspective
Eleven-labs speech synthesis with voice cloning is at the uncanny valley. With two 5-minute samples, my voice sounds a fair bit like my voice but is very clearly not my voice. I find stability ~ 30%, similarity ~ 80% and style ~50% gives a reasonable outcome. But the default voices (e.g. Joseph, George, Charlie) are excellent.
Practical AI podcast: AI predictions for
AI by API is the norm today and will grow
- Just having AI is no longer a differentiator
- AI is part of life, not just work
- #TODO Explore quickdrop from Stability for Maruti
- #TODO Explore Codium VS Code plugin and Continue.dev
- Hybrid systems that combine stats, ML, DL and AI models will grow
- AGI and AutoGPT resurgence
- RAG will continue to be a focus
- GPT4 will be beaten by open source models. Special purpose models beat it already
- Self hosted and cloud hosted models will grow for security
- Small language models will grow
- Productivity will be enhanced rather than replaced
- Multi modal models will grow
- Cost efficiency will grow in focus
GPT Builder help explains how the GPT Builder updates GPTs - including some very interesting prompts