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There\u2019s a lot of money in voice cloning.<\/p>\n
Case in point: ElevenLabs<\/a>, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, today announced that it closed an $80 million Series B round co-led by prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.<\/p>\n The round, which also had participation from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital and Credo Ventures, brings ElevenLabs\u2019 total raised to $101 million and values the company at over $1 billion (up from ~$100 million last June<\/a>). CEO Mati Staniszewski says the new cash will be put toward product development, expanding ElevenLabs\u2019 infrastructure and team, AI research and \u201cenhancing safety measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of AI technology.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe raised the new money to cement ElevenLabs\u2019 position as the global leader in voice AI research and product deployment,\u201d Staniszewski told TechCrunch in an email interview.<\/p>\n Co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer, and Staniszewski, a former Palantir deployment strategist, ElevenLabs launched in beta around a year ago. Staniszewski says that he and Dabkowski, who grew up in Poland, were inspired to create voice cloning tools by poorly dubbed American films. AI could do better, they thought.<\/p>\n Today, ElevenLabs is perhaps best known for its browser-based speech generation app that can create lifelike voices with adjustable toggles for intonation, emotion, cadence and other key vocal characteristics. For free, users can enter text and get a recording of that text read aloud by one of several default voices. Paying customers can upload voice samples to craft new styles using ElevenLabs\u2019 voice cloning.<\/p>\n Increasingly, ElevenLabs is investing in versions of its speech-generating tech aimed at creating audiobooks and dubbing films and TV shows, as well as generating character voices for games and marketing activations.<\/p>\n Last year, the company released a \u201cspeech to speech\u201d tool that attempts to preserve a speaker\u2019s voice, prosody and intonation while automatically removing background noise, and \u2014 in the case of movies and TV shows \u2014 translates and synchronizes speech with the source material. On the roadmap for the coming weeks is a new dubbing studio workflow with tools to generate and edit transcripts and translations and a subscription-based mobile app that narrates webpages and text using ElevenLabs voices.<\/p>\n ElevenLabs\u2019 innovations have won the startup customers in Paradox Interactive, the game developer whose recent projects include Cities: Skylines 2 and Stellaris, and The Washington Post \u2014 among other publishing, media and entertainment companies. Staniszewski claims that ElevenLab users have generated the equivalent of more than 100 years of audio and that the platform is being used by employees at 41% of Fortune 500 companies.<\/p>\n But the publicity hasn\u2019t been totally positive.<\/p>\n The infamous message board 4chan, known for its conspiratorial content,\u00a0used<\/a> ElevenLabs\u2019 tools to share hateful messages mimicking celebrities like actress Emma Watson. The Verge\u2019s James Vincent was able to tap ElevenLabs to maliciously clone voices in a matter of seconds, generating<\/a> samples containing everything from threats of violence to racist and transphobic remarks. And over at Vox, reporter Joseph Cox documented<\/a> generating a clone convincing enough to fool a bank\u2019s authentication system.<\/p>\n In response, ElevenLabs has attempted to root out users repeatedly violating its terms of service, which prohibits abuse, and rolled out a tool to detect speech created by its platform. This year, ElevenLabs plans to improve the detection tool to flag audio from other voice-generating AI models and partner with unnamed \u201cdistribution players\u201d to make the tool available on third-party platforms, Staniszewski says.<\/p>\n ElevenLabs offers an array of different voices, some synthetic, some cloned from voice actors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n ElevenLabs has also faced criticism from voice actors who claim that the company uses samples of their voices without their consent \u2014 samples that could be leveraged to promote content they don\u2019t endorse or spread mis- and dis-information. In a recent<\/a> Vice article, victims recount how ElevenLabs was used in harassment campaigns against them, in one example to share an actor\u2019s private information \u2014 their home address \u2014 using a cloned voice.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the elephant in the room: the existential threat platforms like ElevenLabs pose to the voice acting industry.<\/p>\n Motherboard writes<\/a> about how voice actors are increasingly being asked to sign away rights to their voices so that clients can use AI to generate synthetic versions that could eventually replace them \u2014 sometimes without commensurate compensation. The fear is that voice work \u2014 particularly cheap, entry-level work \u2014 will eventually be replaced by AI-generated vocals, and that actors will have no recourse.<\/p>\n Some platforms are trying to strike a balance. Earlier this month, Replica Studios, an ElevenLabs competitor, signed a deal with SAG-AFTRA to create and license digital replicas of the media artist union members\u2019 voices. In a press release, the organizations said that the arrangement established \u201cfair\u201d and \u201cethical\u201d terms and conditions to ensure performer consent \u2014 and negotiating terms for uses of digital voice doubles in new works.<\/p>\n