Today, AI-powered synthetic voice cloning company ElevenLabs announced that it has closed an $80 million series B round. The new funding gives the two-year-old startup a valuation of more than $1 billion, up from $100 million last June. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors included Sequoia Capital and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Through ElevenLabs’s speech-generation app users can produce voices that sound real, even adjusting vocal characteristics like tone and cadence. Users can also enter text for the voice to read and upload preexisting voice samples to be cloned. CEO Mati Staniszewski claims that ElevenLabs is currently being used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies, though its reputation has perhaps been cemented by its embrace among AI tinkerers online.
Staniszewski told TechCrunch that the new round will be used for product development and “enhancing safety measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology.” This is not something that the company has always focused on. Message board 4chan used the technology to create harmful messages in the voices of celebrities like actress Emma Watson. Reporters including James Vincent at The Verge and Vice’s Joseph Cox have used ElevenLabs to generate recordings of hateful content and trick a bank’s authentication system, respectively. ElevenLabs says it has worked to remove users who create abusive content from the platform. The company is also improving its speech detection tool to identify hate speech and flag audio generated by other AI models.
Recently, the company has been investing in technology to create audiobooks and dub film and TV shows. Other applications include generating character voices for games (which may put many actors out of work). In the coming weeks, ElevenLabs will release tools for dubbing that can generate and edit transcripts and translations. A mobile app that can narrate web pages and text is also on the way.
Voice actors have criticized the company for using samples of their work without their consent, saying these samples could be used to promote content they disagree with or spread misinformation. To ensure actors receive adequate compensation, the company plans to release a marketplace for voices. The marketplace would allow users to create a voice, share it, and receive credits towards ElevenLabs’s premium offering every time the voice is used.
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