Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, James Dean … Sir Laurence Olivier. Thanks to AI voice start-up ElevenLabs’ Reader app and its new Iconic Voices collection, they have new posthumous careers and no doubt new fans (of their voices at least) and their estates have a new source of income.
Their voices are being popularly used to create “an emotionally rich, context-aware voiceover” for digital text such as news sites, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters and e-books. The voices all speak English only and are currently only available to iOS users in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. An Android version is in the works.
“It’s exciting to see our mother’s voice available to the countless millions of people who love her. Through the spectacular new technology offered by ElevenLabs, 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.”
Liza Minelli, of her mother Judy Garland