New York-based ElevenLabs is going global with its generative AI text-to-speech reader app, which can narrate writings in 32 languages with thousands of voices from which to choose. The audio startup promises “high quality, human-like” AI voices that are “emotionally and contextually aware,” adapting delivery of written cues “to achieve a high emotional range.” ElevenLabs has focused on “creative workflow,” with a voice isolator and audio effects generator tools. Its catalog includes the voices of celebrities Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Burt Reynolds. Custom models for translation and voiceover work using contemporary actors is a future possibility.

For now, ElevenLabs’ emphasis is on standard business applications such as voicing books, articles, podcast scripts and business presentations. The text-to-speech app is available only on iOS and Android for now.

An ElevenLabs blog post explains the app has added Optical Character Recognition (OCR) support, “so you can now read text from images along with ePubs, PDFs, web pages, and more.”

“The reader app is free to download and use, and won’t consume credits from the broader ElevenLabs web-based subscription plan,” notes The Verge, which writes that “the company is, however, planning to ‘eventually launch some premium version of the app,’ but is promising to have a ‘generous free plan’ available when that happens.”

Users can easily try it using a web-based text-to-speech generator.

In June, the text-to-speech app was initially released in the U.S., Canada and the UK, and ElevenLabs has now made it available worldwide, with language support for Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Swedish, among others. The complete list is available on ElevenLabs’ website.

As for the celebrity voices, The Verge says it’s sampled some and they’re “impressive enough to avoid sounding overly robotic,” adding that “ElevenLabs said their respective heirs were ‘excited to see their legacies live on.’”

TechCrunch writes that the company “became a unicorn earlier this year after raising $80 million from investors,” at which point it was valued at $1 billion. “The company powers voice interactions on the Rabbit r1, as well as text-to-speech features on AI-powered search engine Perplexity and audio platforms Pocket FM and Kuku FM.” ElevenLabs also powers Pika Labs’ Lip Sync.

This summer, ElevenLabs released its Voice Isolator and Sound Effects tools. TechCruch says, adding that “the Reader app is its first consumer-facing product.”

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