News Summary: ElevenLabs Launches End-to-End Audiobook Production Tool Following London Summit

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.

News Summary: Spotify Tests AI Audiobook Recaps; ElevenLabs Signs Celebrity Deals for AI Voices

It’s clearly been a busy time for platforms locking themselves away in their sheds, because several of the biggest seem to have stumbled back into the daylight to show us what they’ve built. Today, I want to talk about two of them that are of particular interest to us—and I have a third saved for Thursday’s news.

ElevenLabs Expands AI Audio Capabilities, Microsoft Pushes Back on AI Regulation: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Only a year or so ago, publishers were raging at what they saw as rights grabs by tech firms using AI audio and other technologies to convert books from the medium in which they were purchased to another medium, usually sold separately and considered subject to a different set of rights. AI companies now seem to be performing these medium transformations as a matter of course, and I am hearing barely a whisper of dissent amid the wider battles over copyright and AI.