ElevenLabs is a company I've reported on a lot, but this time they really are in the spotlight following their recent summit. As a reminder, ElevenLabs is the tech giant that specializes in AI-generated voice production. It sells its services into various sectors, but the area of real interest to us is audiobooks, where the company offers various options for voice narration in different accents of different languages. Most significantly, ElevenLabs works with Findaway Voices by Spotify to enable indie authors (and others) to produce audiobooks for the streaming platform.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The ElevenLabs Summit
Publishing Perspectives has a great roundup on the recent ElevenLabs Summit, which brought one thousand people primarily from the world of tech and investment together in London to talk about the future potential of voice-generated AI.
For a recap, I recommend reading it. I liked the piece particularly because it joined the dots I've tried to join consistently in this column about (among other tools) the company's ElevenReader app, which allows people to generate voice narration for an e-book without buying an audiobook.
I have consistently said that such tools seem very similar in nature to the thwarted Audible Captions initiative (and the piece references Kindle's text-to-speech), which raised rights holder ire because it questions the fundamental notion that different formats each have different rights that should be exploitable separately by rights holders.
Audiobooks in ElevenCreative
But the biggest ElevenLabs news this week is the launch of Audiobooks in ElevenCreative. Audiobooks is an end-to-end audiobook production tool. It is aimed at publishers but also at indie authors, with the promise, “From manuscript to audiobook, in one workflow.”
It also offers distribution, not just to ElevenReader but other audiobook channels, with a single dashboard to control operations and track sales. Audiobook creators get to select from a wide variety of ElevenLabs voices or use a version of their own voice.
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