ElevenLab’s AI voice-generating technology is expanding to 30 languages

ElevenLabs is a startup that has made headlines for its AI-powered voice-generating platform, which has been used for narrating audiobooks and increasing content accessibility, but also misused to make it seem like public figures are saying terrible things. The platform is now leaving beta and expanding significantly into more languages. 

On Monday, ElevenLabs announced that the platform is coming out of a beta stage that began in January and the startup also revealed a new foundational multilingual deep-learning model, Eleven Multilingual v2. 

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Eleven Multilingual v2 supports 30 languages and allows people around the world to use ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech and voice-cloning capabilities. 

When users input text, the model automatically identifies the written language and generates speech with “an unprecedented level of authenticity”, according to the release. 

The speaker’s unique voice characteristics — regardless of whether it’s a synthetic or cloned voice — remain the same across all 30 languages, which ensures the same style of speech is used, including accent.

“ElevenLabs was started with the dream of making all content universally accessible in any language and in any voice,” said Mati Staniszewski, CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs. 

“With the release of Eleven Multilingual v2, we are one step closer to making this dream a reality and making human-quality AI voices available in every dialect.” 

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ElevenLabs identified some potential use cases for this application, such as allowing indie authors to make audiobooks, translating video game experiences and audio content for international audiences, and increasing content accessibility for people with visual impairments and additional learning needs. 

As listed in the release, the supported languages include Korean, Dutch, Turkish, Swedish, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech, Finnish, Romanian, Danish, Bulgarian, Malay, Hungarian, Norwegian, Slovak, Croatian, Classic Arabic, Tamil, English, Polish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hindi, and Portuguese.