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If you’ve ever found yourself reading an article on your iPhone and then need to drive, walk, bike, do chores, or otherwise take your eyes off the screen somewhere, ElevenLabs has an app for you.
The AI audio creation company, founded by former Palantir engineers, today launched its first iOS app, “ElevenLabs Reader: AI Audio.”
Unlike the full ElevenLabs website, which includes a variety of different AI models and features including text-to-speech, converting speech into other voices and languages, AI dubbing, and AI sound effects, the new ElevenLabs iOS app more closely tailored and specifically aimed at converting text files or links from the Internet into spoken text that the user can listen to on the go, or do something else with their eyes and hands, such as barbecuing, preparing food, doing dishes, etc.
Initially, this text-to-speech functionality will only be available in English in the app, although a popover screen suggests that the full 29+ languages that ElevenLabs supports on the web will soon make their way to the iOS Reader as well. app.
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The app can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store and requires iOS 15 or later versions of the software.
To do this, you will need to log in with an existing ElevenLabs account or create a new account with your email address and password, or use your Google or Apple account to log in.
Once you log in, you’ll be presented with a list of pre-loaded text files with accompanying narration, most of which appear to be fairy tales and folkloric tales already in the public domain, such as Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Victorian mystery series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Tapping on any of these stories will display the text and immediately begin AI voiceover narration, with a green interactive highlighter following each word spoken by the AI narrator.
Of course, most of us busy adults have other things to read besides fairy tales, so there’s also a plus button in the top right corner of the app’s main menu that the user can click and open a menu that says “Add.” content” of their own content, including writing their own text, importing a URL they copied and pasted from their mobile web browser, or a file from the iOS Files app.
The app also integrates with iOS’s standard Share Sheet, allowing the user to add a widget to the share sheet of their iOS Safari browser while browsing and share links from the browser view to the ElevenLabs iOS Reader app, without having to copy and paste.
By tapping the default speed indicator of 1.0x at the bottom right of the app, the user can increase or decrease the speed between 0.8x and 2x. However, you cannot select these speeds from a drop-down or scrolling menu. Instead, you just have to tap to go through them all one by one, which can be a bit annoying for some users.
By tapping the sound wave icon in the left icon, the user can choose from 11 (natch) different voices and accents, from male to female, American to Austrian to British English.
Uploading a PDF file containing images and graphics from my iOS Files app to the ElevenLabs iOS Reader app took a few seconds in my testing, and the app deleted all images and displayed only text. There were also some formatting issues that made the narration somewhat rewarding – pausing at inopportune moments for line breaks.
During my brief testing, I also encountered a few random error messages and text-to-audio conversion failures.
However, the app is brand new and will undoubtedly be improved soon. And the actual functionality of AI voice-over narration was generally surprisingly fluid and incredibly accurate and immersive. It even worked on VentureBeat articles and a completely new manuscript of over 300 pages.
A big question is whether ElevenLabs captures all the text data and files a user sends to the app, stores it somewhere (and if so, whether that’s encrypted and private storage), and/or trains on the files a user pastes or uploads. We’ve reached out to the company for an answer and will update as soon as we hear back.