Did you know that you could have this very article read to you by Laurence Olivier? Wouldn’t it be cool to learn about how AI is bringing dead celebrities’ voices back to life by the very voice of a famous film star? Well, it’s about to all be possible.
ElevenLabs, the AI company leading the pack in many text-to-speech and other AI audio tools and features, recently announced that they’ve reached deals with the estates of several famous Hollywood celebrities to bring their voices to their Reader App—which, for now, will allow folks to listen to these voices read their favorite books or news articles.
However, in the future, this technology is very likely going to move to content creation and text-to-speech, which is—by all accounts—starting to get creepy.
ElevenLabs Licenses Celebrity Voices
While we’ve covered ElevenLabs in the past, most of the company’s new technologies have been focused on different uses of AI to manipulate audio for various video-related purposes. And, honestly, this latest technology shouldn’t come as a major surprise as we’ve already seen (or at least heard) various living celebrities lend their voices to different AI-powered audio tools. (You can read more about it here.)
But, with this news of ElevenLabs reaching deals with the estates of these different past-away celebrities, there is a new factor that is a bit creepy, or even cringy, about where this technology is headed.
Introduced as ElevenLabs’ “Iconic Voices”, this new tool will allow users to listen to their favorite books and articles voiced by Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier on their Reader App, which is free to download and use.
However, as many online are pointing out, this technology is most likely going to continue to evolve. Whether these licensed deals cover future uses for text-to-speech or content creation is unclear. But it wouldn’t be surprising to see AI head that way next.
Author: Jourdan Aldredge
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
