Eleven Labs is the best-known company working on the production of AI-generated voices. And in the past week, they have been busy translating that technology into tools for indie authors to use to create audiobooks.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
This will obviously be a controversial topic for many authors who reject the use of generative AI, but it’s nonetheless an important development. And, for now at any rate, as Eleven Labs tries to gain traction in the audiobook space for its ElevenReader app, it’s financially interesting.
Eleven Labs Expands Audiobook Creation Tools
As of February 25, all authors can create and publish audiobooks directly through Eleven Labs for readers to listen to via the ElevenReader app. This has been available as a beta test to invited authors since last year.
You can find details on how to do this on the ElevenReader YouTube channel, in a video I was rather surprised to find had only 1,000 views several days after being posted.
Apparently, the average reader spends 19 minutes listening to content at the moment. I'm not sure that sounds like a ringing endorsement. But it is also interesting to note that 11 minutes is the current cutoff for a royalty payment to be triggered—at the rate of $1.10 per title.
Eleven Labs really wants to expand its position in this space and sees its royalty payments as a way of gaining traction with authors. The cost for doing this starts at—can you guess? That’s right, $11 per month.
AI Narration Comes to Spotify via Eleven Labs
But it’s not just direct dealings with indies that Eleven Labs has been expanding. At the end of last month, they also announced a deal with Spotify that will allow authors to create AI-narrated audiobooks and upload them to Spotify. To do this, authors will need the same kind of Eleven Labs account, which they can use to create an audiobook. They can then push the book out to Spotify through Findaway Voices.
It’s not so much a new direct distribution deal as a change to Spotify’s terms around generative AI that allows AI-generated narration of audiobooks if that narration is generated by Eleven Labs.
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