Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
AIght AIght AIght? Artificial-intelligence company ElevenLabs says it is bringing on Matthew McConaughey as an investor as it makes a push to expand its voice offerings to a public seeking the digital locutions of the dead and famous. As part of that push, the company is also launching an “iconic voice marketplace” which will allow users — mainly brands — to connect with reps for celebrities living and long gone and work out a licensing deal to use their AI voices. Part-tech company and part AI-voice bazaar, ElevenLabs has thousands of voices of lesser known people it has enlisted for AI voice-generation. Those people, who have consented for an AI to be trained on their voices, can be prompted to say what a subscriber needs them to say without further agreement. (Well, their voice avatars can be thus prompted.) They ring up a commission each time a customer does so — an Etsy for vocal chords. But what ElevenLabs has yet to do is allow companies (or deep-pocketed people with unconventional appetites) to pay for a customized AI voice from an iconic celebrity, uttering the words the company needs it to say. Enter the “marketplace,” under which customers can interface with the celebrity, or their reps or estate managers, to negotiate a paid license for said celebrity’s commercial AI-generated message. The upside for the company is the chance to have a celebrity read a promotional message that they need read. The upside for the celebrity is getting paid without having to read anything. The list of actors joining the marketplace isn’t long but it is bonkers, and includes the not-so-recently-departed, such as John Wayne, Lana Turner, Judy Garland and Shoeless Joe Jackson (for the 1919 Black Sox fan in your life). It also includes some living celebrities, such as Michael Caine, Liza Minelli and Art Garfunkel. (For a complete list see below.) These celebrities or their estates have only agreed to let their voices be trained; agreements would need to be negotiated separately. Still, the marketplace streamlines the process of hiring a famous AI voice and brings us one step closer to an entertainment world you never imagined and your grandmother would have shooed you for suggesting: a world in which the 20th-century sports or screen icon doesn’t go away, they just keep declaiming to us from beyond the grave. Imagine Amelia Earhart selling you airline tickets. J. Robert Oppenheimer pitching alternative energy. Richard Feynman teaching that adult ed class. Judy Garland hawking paving stones. Laurence Olivier peddling Halloween skulls. (Come on, you’d buy that last one.) “We’re looking to create a library of iconic voices from all kinds of time periods that can be used for all kinds of creative projects,” Dustin Blank, who heads partnerships at ElevenLabs, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They occupy a space in our collective memory around a lot of important moments.” Just the same, he says, this dead-celebrity play should hardly be seen as the company’s main use case. “We also have living celebrities and living icons. It’s just another offering,” he said. To produce these voices, the company uses both voice cloning (capturing the characteristics of a person’s voice) and voice replication (which then kicks in when someone prompts a voice using text.) While video generation has grabbed many of the headlines, that realm is painstaking and filled with errors, which is why many experts see AI voices as a much nearer frontier in the push to make media synthetic. McConaughey has already made his own voice available for the ElevenReader app, a pre-existing product that allows customers to chose from a list of authorized voices to read any memo or book to them personally. (If you don’t want your emails read to you by Wooderson I honestly don’t even know what to tell you.) In addition to his investment of an undisclosed sum, McConaughey will also use ElevenLabs to translate his newsletter Lyrics of Livin’ into a fluent flawlessly accented Spanish, which he apparently does not speak. “Since our first conversation, I’ve been impressed by how the ElevenLabs team has taken the magic of the core technology and turned it into products that creators, enterprises, and storytellers use daily,” the actor said in a statement. “I launched my newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, as a way to share stories and ideas in my own voice with those who want to listen. Now, thanks to ElevenLabs, Lyrics of Livin’ is expanding with a Spanish language edition, allowing us to reach and connect with even more people.” McConaughey in the past has expressed both interest in and caution about AI, saying while he’d like to use it to get to know himself better, he prefers models he can train only on his own material to mass-produced systems like ChatGPT. “I do have a little pride about not wanting to use an open-ended AI to share my information so it can be part of the worldwide AI vernacular,” he said on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month. I am interested, though, in a private LLM where I can upload, hey, here’s three books I’ve written. Here’s my other favorite book. Here’s my favorite articles I’ve been cutting and pasting over the 10 years. And log all that in…so I can ask it questions based on that and basically learn more about myself.” Caine is also joining the ElevenReader app; if you’ve ever wanted War and Peace narrated to you in a Cockney accent, this is your chance. “With ElevenLabs, we can preserve and share voices — not just mine, but anyone’s,” Caine said (presumably in his own voice). A litany of VC’s have poured at least $279 million into ElevenLabs in the four years since its founding by a pair of Polish-born entrepeneurs named Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski, who worked at Google and Palantir, respectively. They and their partners say voice technology doesn’t just connect past generations to the present but living people from different linguistic parts of the globe whose voices would otherwise never be heard. “To everyone building with voice technology: keep going. You’re helping create a future where we can look up from our screens and connect through something as timeless as humanity itself—our voices,” McConaughey said in a statement. The company also has a suite of other products, such as “Speech Synthesis,” which aims to produce lifelike speech from text, and Conversation AI, which will help developers perfect the voice of AI Agents. If we are soon awash in AI voices — and increasingly unable to tell them apart from human ones — ElevenLabs will be the reason why. By giving the famous the ability to negotiate their own deals (and working out a profit-share when they do), ElevenLabs is also avoiding the kind of unlicensed training of celebrity content endemic to some rivals. “This model enables ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognizable voices, personalities, and brands — ensuring that creative use of iconic identities is transparent, fair, and authorized,” ElevenLabs said in a press release. Still, even with the ethical sourcing, the question remains whether society should head to a place of dead-voice overload. First, there’s the matter of how it might crowd out workaday voice actors. Second, there’s the matter of whether we want to be awash in the sounds of Thomas Edison and Mark Twain when the lightbulb and Tom Sawyer seem like legacy enough. ElevenLabs executives say they see little downside in a world of late famous voices available at the swipe of a screen. “There’s definitely a demand,” Blank said. “We’re here to move that along and make sure there’s a marketplace where it can be filled.” Here’s the full list of iconic voices available for potential licensing on the Iconic Voice Marketplace:
