ElevenLabs, a business that develops AI-powered tools for creating and editing synthetic voices, is making its Reader app available globally, with support for 32 languages.
The program, which was first published in June in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, allows users to upload and listen to any text content — such as articles, PDF documents, or e-books — in a variety of languages and voices. Reader now supports several languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Italian, Tamil, and Swedish.
ElevenLabs, which became a unicorn earlier this year after receiving $80 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, offers an API that businesses can utilize for a variety of applications such as dubbing and text-to-speech. The business powers voice interactions on the Rabbit r1, as well as text-to-speech functions on Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, and the audio platforms Pocket FM and Kuku FM. The Reader app is the company's first consumer-facing product.
The business stated that it has introduced hundreds of additional voices to its collection that are appropriate for various languages. Last month, the business leased the app's voices from actors including Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier.
ElevenLabs claims that the additional language support is powered by its Turbo v2.5 model, which reduces text-to-speech delay and increases quality.
Speechify, the Reader app's closest competitor, has extra capabilities such as document scanning for text, interfaces with Gmail and Canvas, and the ability for users to clone their own voice to read out text. Pocket, owned by Mozilla, and The New York Times' Audm-based audio app both allow users to listen to content.
ElevenLabs promised to provide further capabilities to the app, such as offline functionality and the option to exchange audio clips.