ElevenLabs adds celebrity AI voices to its new digital narrator – but is it safe?

A week ago, ElevenLabs, the AI ​​language startup founded by former Google and Palantir engineers, made headlines with its first major consumer-facing product – a reader app.

The product is currently available for iOS and is a dedicated voiceover solution that converts any text file or link from the internet into AI audio and narrates it using various AI voices and accents. Today, the company announced that it is expanding this library of voices in the app to include AI voices of late Hollywood stars Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier.

The company has partnered with CMG Worldwide, the firm that manages and protects the intellectual property rights of living and deceased celebrities, to recreate and bring the iconic voices to market. In addition, the company plans to build on this work and bring many more famous AI voices to market in the coming months.

Reader gives every digital text an AI voice

While ElevenLabs focuses specifically on the creative industry with AI models for text-to-speech and speech-to-speech conversion, dubbing, and sound effects creation, the Reader app offers a bespoke form of their research in text-to-speech. All a user has to do is provide the link or file for any digital text – be it an article, PDF, newsletter, or 300-page e-book – and the app immediately processes the text and begins the voiceover AI narration, with a green highlighter marking each word spoken by the AI.

The feature is available in English, but users can customize their experience by choosing from 11 voices and accents, from male to female, American to Austrian to British English. Iconic Voices, launched today, complement this experience, allowing users to discover and experience content in the voice of the deceased stars.

Imagine if a user could listen to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in the voice of the late Judy Garland, who starred in the film adaptation of the novel.

For the family members of the deceased stars, AI-based voice emulation is an opportunity to ensure that the celebrity’s legacy lives on. Their existing fans get a way to reconnect with them, and new users get a way to discover them. ElevenLabs, on the other hand, expects the announcement to lead to more engagement on the new app.

“Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier are among the most iconic actors in history. We deeply respect their legacies and are honored to have their voices on our platform,” said Dustin Blank, Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs. “Adding them to our growing roster of voice artists is an important step forward in our mission to make content accessible in any language and with any voice.”

Are these AI voices safe from misuse?

One of the biggest concerns surrounding voice cloning technology – as used here – is that voice replicas of famous people can be portrayed as saying things they never said in the real world. Biden’s robocall incident is the best example of such a problem. And what if a CEO’s voice is cloned to make him say things that could potentially damage his reputation or that of his company?

ElevenLabs says the company understands these concerns and is committed to expanding partnerships for the Iconic Voices feature with a particular focus on security.

Sam Sklar, who heads up growth marketing at ElevenLabs, told VentureBeat that the company retains full control over the celebrity voices and makes them available only in the Reader app, which is designed so that users can convert digital text into AI narration for individual use only and cannot further share or download it.

“For example, you can select an article on VentureBeat through the Reader app and choose Judy Garland to read it just for you. You can’t access their voice through the ElevenLabs speech library (a separate web product from the company). That means they can’t be used in conjunction with our typical text-to-speech tools on the platform, nor can the content they read through the Reader app be downloaded or shared,” he explained.

When a user uploads harmful content as text to record their iconic voiceover via a second device, the company doesn’t even generate the AI ​​voiceover. It has automated and human moderation processes in place to identify and block hate speech and other forms of text that violate the terms of service.

As for the possibility of the voice library being abused to clone celebrity voices from scratch, Sklar says the platform is equipped with several safeguards, including voice captcha verification that matches the audio samples uploaded for cloning with the user’s voice recording. If the voice doesn’t match after a few attempts, the clone request won’t be processed. There is also a “no-go” voice policy that prohibits cloning voices that are considered high-risk.

“Any attempt to clone these voices will be blocked,” Sklar said.

While these measures reduce the likelihood of celebrities, actors and CEOs’ voices being cloned, violations can still occur. For example, malicious users could craft the Reader app’s content to bypass the company’s moderation measures.

In the long term, it will be interesting to see how the iconic voices feature, which has been positioned as an offering to fans and enthusiasts, impacts the industry. The Reader app that includes this feature will launch globally as well as for Android devices this summer, with support for additional languages ​​also on the way.