[ad_1]
As we speak, AI-powered artificial voice cloning firm ElevenLabs introduced that it has closed an $80 million sequence B spherical. The brand new funding provides the two-year-old startup a valuation of greater than $1 billion, up from $100 million final June. The spherical was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, and different buyers included Sequoia Capital and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Via ElevenLabs’s speech-generation app customers can produce voices that sound actual, even adjusting vocal traits like tone and cadence. Customers may also enter textual content for the voice to learn and add preexisting voice samples to be cloned. CEO Mati Staniszewski claims that ElevenLabs is presently being utilized by workers at 41% of Fortune 500 corporations, although its popularity has maybe been cemented by its embrace amongst AI tinkerers on-line.
Staniszewski advised TechCrunch that the brand new spherical shall be used for product improvement and “enhancing security measures to make sure accountable and moral improvement of AI expertise.” This isn’t one thing that the corporate has all the time targeted on. Message board 4chan used the expertise to create dangerous messages within the voices of celebrities like actress Emma Watson. Reporters together with James Vincent at The Verge and Vice’s Joseph Cox have used ElevenLabs to generate recordings of hateful content material and trick a financial institution’s authentication system, respectively. ElevenLabs says it has labored to take away customers who create abusive content material from the platform. The corporate can also be bettering its speech detection device to determine hate speech and flag audio generated by different AI fashions.
Just lately, the corporate has been investing in expertise to create audiobooks and dub movie and TV reveals. Different purposes embody producing character voices for video games (which can put many actors out of labor). Within the coming weeks, ElevenLabs will launch instruments for dubbing that may generate and edit transcripts and translations. A cellular app that may narrate internet pages and textual content can also be on the best way.
Voice actors have criticized the corporate for utilizing samples of their work with out their consent, saying these samples may very well be used to advertise content material they disagree with or unfold misinformation. To make sure actors obtain ample compensation, the corporate plans to launch a market for voices. {The marketplace} would permit customers to create a voice, share it, and obtain credit in direction of ElevenLabs’s premium providing each time the voice is used.
[ad_2]
Source link
