ElevenLabs, an AI audio startup, has made its Reader app available for iOS devices on Wednesday. This app promises to revolutionize the way we consume content by using AI to read aloud text from various sources, including news articles, PDFs, ePubs, and even web links. Users can select from a library of high-quality, human-like voices to listen to, and they have control over the reading speed. The Reader app is currently available for users in the U.S., U.K., and Canada on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices running iOS or iPadOS 15 or later. An Android version is in development, with a waitlist available for interested users. ElevenLabs plans to expand the app’s availability to the E.U. in a couple of weeks, around July 11th.
ElevenLabs has ambitious plans for the future of the Reader app. They are working on features like offline playback, RSS feed access, AI summarization, and the ability to share snippets with friends. They also intend to expand the spoken languages to encompass all 29 languages supported by their multilingual model. The company emphasizes the need for user-friendly tools to both create and consume audio content, believing that AI audio models are only valuable when they are accessible to users. While the first three months of usage are free, ElevenLabs will eventually begin charging for the service, though the subscription cost is yet to be announced.
It’s worth noting that ElevenLabs trains its AI voice models on public domain data, data acquired through agreements with commercial partners, and publicly available data. This allows them to offer a range of services, from dubbing and automatic translation to voice cloning, automatic narration, and even AI voice generation for characters in the Unreal Engine.
