Cekura (YC): Launch Video - 800K views

Cekura (YC) built Cekura Bench to rank voice AI: 50+ models across speech to speech, speech to text, text to speech and voice platforms. The audience was the people building those models, AI labs. It’s the hardest room to impress, because they know the subject better than anyone.

The brief Launch the benchmark on X. Reach the top voice AI labs and send them to benchmarks.cekura.ai.

The problem Nobody feels a benchmark. A leaderboard is a table, and a researcher scrolls past a table in a second. Cekura also didn’t want to be seen as a testing tool. It’s the data layer that helps voice AI get good enough to run the world. The film had to make that future feel close and make the gap feel real.

The idea The movie Her came out in 2013. Thirteen years later, voice AI still isn’t there. So we didn’t open with a chart. We opened with the dream: a man waking up to an AI that runs his day. Then we showed what that dream needs to hold up. [It has to hear him over noise, switch languages and know when to stay quiet.] Those are the things Cekura Bench measures.

What we cut We wrote four or five scripts and scrapped cuts that already looked good. Any line we couldn’t prove came out, because a room full of AI researchers would catch it. We kept model names and numbers out of the voiceover and let the benchmark show them on screen.

Concept and script

The launch film

On-screen benchmark charts and category cards for speech to speech, speech to text and text to speech

Winner reveal cards for each category

A launch plan for X: founder posts from his own account, link in the reply, timed for US and Indian audiences

The result - 800K views.

Two years with Cekura This is one of many films we’ve made for Cekura over two years, including launch films, Product Hunt videos, a product demo and an explainer. Two of those launches finished #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Most were delivered in under 72 hours, because we already know the product.

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