For example, consider ElevenLabs, a firm creating artificial intelligence-powered tools for producing and editing synthetic voices. Today, the company announced that it has raised a $80 million Series B investment co-led by well-known investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
(Image Source: Techcrunch.com)
With participation from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures, the round values ElevenLabs at over $1 billion, up from around $100 million in June last year. ElevenLabs has received $101 million in total. According to CEO Mati Staniszewski, the additional funds will go toward developing new products, growing the staff and infrastructure of ElevenLabs, conducting AI research, and “improving safety measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology.”
ElevenLabs, co-founded in 2022 by Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, and Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer, debuted in beta about a year ago. Staniszewski claims that badly dubbed American movies served as inspiration for him and Dabkowski, both of whom are Polish natives, to develop voice cloning software. They believed AI could perform better.
ElevenLabs’ most well-known product is its browser-based speech synthesis application, which produces realistic voices with adjustable toggles for intonation, emotion, cadence, and other essential vocal aspects. Users can submit text and have it read aloud for free by one of several default voices on a recording. ElevenLabs offers voice cloning services that allow paying clients to create new styles by uploading voice samples.
ElevenLabs is spending more and more on voice-generating technologies to produce audiobooks, dub movies, and TV series and create character voices for video games and promotional campaigns.
The business unveiled a “speech to speech” solution last year to maintain a speaker’s voice, prosody, and intonation while automatically eliminating background noise. It also translates and synchronizes speech with the original content in the case of movies and TV shows. A new dubbing studio process that includes tools for creating and editing transcripts and translations and an app that is available for a subscription and narrates text and web pages utilizing ElevenLabs voices are planned for the upcoming weeks.
According to Motherboard, voice actors are increasingly being requested to give over the rights to their voices so that companies can utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to create synthetic replicas of them that may one day take their place, sometimes without paying them a fair price. Actors worry that voice work, especially low-paying, entry-level jobs, may soon be supplanted by artificial intelligence-generated voices and that they won’t have any other options.
Some platforms are attempting to achieve equilibrium. Replica Studios, an ElevenLabs rival, and SAG-AFTRA inked an agreement earlier this month to produce and license digital voices of media artist union members. The organizations stated in a press statement that the contract created “fair” and “ethical” terms and conditions to guarantee performer permission, including negotiating arrangements for digital voice duplicates in new works.
However, several voice performers, notably SAG-AFTRA members, weren’t unhappy with this. Marketplace for voices is ElevenLabs’ answer. The marketplace, which is now in alpha and will roll out more broadly in the coming weeks, enables users to record, authenticate, and distribute their voices. According to Staniszewski, original creators are paid when someone else uses their voice.
He said, “Users always maintain control over the availability and compensation terms of their voice.” “The marketplace brings a diverse range of voices to ElevenLabs’ platform and is designed as a step towards harmonizing AI advancements with established industry practices.”
However, voice performers might disagree with ElevenLabs’ current practice of not paying in cash. As things stand right now, ElevenLabs’ premium services are credited to creators—a situation that some may find hilarious, I imagine.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
