Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Santa Cruz-based ElevenLabs, a startup company that has developed synthetic voice creation tools using artificial intelligence, has released its Reader app for worldwide purchase, available in 32 languages. Launched in June of this year in the USA, UK, and Canada, the app enables users to upload text—articles, PDFs, or e-books—and listen in different languages and voices. Currently, the supported languages are Portuguese, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, Japanese, and others.
Last year, ElevenLabs became a unicorn company after it secured $80 million of investment, investors include Andreessen Horowitz. It provides an API for such scenarios as dubbing and text-to-speech, realising interactions on devices, such as Rabbit r1, and platforms, such as Perplexity, Pocket FM, or Kuku FM. Reader is its first consumer product to be targeted in the market for sale by the company.
The company has included new hundreds of voices that correspond to different languages subsequently. Last month, for example, it licensed the voices of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier. Turbo v2. 5 model is at the base of the extended language support since it enhances the TTS speed and quality.
The main competitor of Reader is Speechify which provides such features as document scanning, integration with Gmail and Canvas, and voice cloning. Similar content-listening services are also given by Mozilla-owned Pocket and The New York Times’ Audm-based audio app.
Offline support and the option for publishing of sound snippets is what EleventhLabs wants to introduce to Reader soon.
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