AI-powered audio creator ElevenLabs has brought its synthetic voices to the iPhone with a new iOS app. The ElevenLabs Reader app will read any loaded text or website using ElevenLabs’ library of synthetic and cloned voices – even your own if you want.
Basically, the new app turns books, website content, and any other text into a kind of podcast hosted by any voice you want to hear. Users can listen to content by pasting a link, copying text, uploading a file, or selecting one of the preloaded stories, which are then read in a voice chosen from the library. The stories are in the public domain and come from Project Gutenberg, including “Cinderella,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
As for voices, users can choose based on accent, style, and tone to match the text. That could mean going from a warm, friendly voice reading a child a bedtime story to an energetic, authoritative voice reading a scientific study. The app can run in the background like an audiobook or podcast and is clearly aimed at multitaskers, at least according to the promotional video.
Narrate your life
The ElevenLabs Reader app only narrates in English for now and only in the US, Canada and the UK. The company said it is “working to expand access, add content download and audio sharing features, and add the 29 languages available to ElevenLabs' broader library thanks to its multilingual AI model. The app is included with a subscription to the ElevenLabs platform, although you can get three months of free access without an account. An Android version will also be available soon, with an early access waitlist available to sign up.
“Our mission is to make content accessible in any language and voice, and everything we do is geared toward achieving that mission,” ElevenLabs chief growth officer Sam Sklar explained in a blog post about the new app. “Create best-in-class AI” Audio models are not enough. “Creators need tools through which they can create and consumers need interfaces through which they can consume audio.”
