AI's Inner Voice

ELEVENLABS' computer voices are so convincing they could fool your mother. That's both a blessing-its 30 Under 30 alumni founders are now both billionaires- and a curse for the four-year-old company.

- By Iain Martin

Dubbed films in Poland are horrible. A lone lektor delivers all the dialogue in an enervated Slavic monotone. There is no cast. No variation between speakers. Young audiences hate it. “Ask any Polish person and they will tell you it’s terrible,” says Mateusz (Mati) Staniszewski, the cofounder of AI speech outfit ElevenLabs. “I guess it was a communist thing that stuck as a cheap way to produce content.”

While working at Palantir, Staniszewski teamed up with high school friend and Google engineer Piotr Dabkowski to experiment with artificial intelligence. The pair realized that one project, a particularly promising AI public speaking coach, could solve the uniquely Polish horror of Leonardo DiCaprio or Scarlett Johansson being drowned out by a lektor “star” like Maciej Gudowski.

The pair pooled their savings and by May 2022 had quit their jobs to work full-time on ElevenLabs. Out of the gate, their new AI text-to-speech generator was leagues better than the robotic voices of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. ElevenLabs’ AI voices were capable of happiness, excitement, even laughter.

In January 2023 ElevenLabs launched its first model. It could take any piece of text and use AI to read it aloud in any voice—including a clone of your own (or, worryingly, someone else’s). There was immediate demand. Authors could instantly spawn audiobooks with the software (pro rates now start from $99 a month for higher quality and more time). YouTube creators used ElevenLabs to translate their videos into other languages (its models can now speak in 29).