ElevenLabs wants to turn silver screen legends into your personal narrator. The two-year-old AI startup has launched Iconic Voices, which recreates the speech patterns of departed Hollywood luminaries.
At launch, four Iconic Voices are included in the package. ElevenLabs negotiated with the estates of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Lawrence Olivier to bring star power to its latest venture. Additional celebrity voices will be added to the library in the coming months.
The Iconic Voices will be powered by ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech model, which has been its key product since its inception. Other recent upgrades to the company’s tech have included an AI-powered voice isolator and a slew of lifelike AI voices.
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To activate the more stentorian voices of Garland, Dean, Reynolds, and Olivier, ElevenLabs users must first enter a passage into the platform’s Text Reader. The reader is also available through the App Store, with Android support arriving in the coming weeks.
“It’s exciting to see our mother’s voice available to the countless millions of people who love her,” said Garland’s daughter Liza Minelli, who represents the Wizard of Oz star’s estate, in a statement. “Through the spectacular new technology offered by Eleven Labs, our family believes that this will bring new fans to Mama, and be exciting to those who already cherish the unparalleled legacy that Mama gave and continues to give to the world.”
Since its launch in 2022, ElevenLabs has grown rapidly by positioning itself at the forefront of the AI boom. It bagged a $19 million Series A last year and followed that up with an $80 million Series B early in 2024. That round carried a company valuation of $1.1 billion.
Dustin Blank, the Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs, described the Iconic Voices as “a major step forward in our mission of making content accessible in any language and voice.” If Blank is looking for ideas about future Iconic Voices to add, I think a Borat AI could be “very nice.”
