AI audio startup ElevenLabs has now made its text-to-speech Reader app available across the world, adding support for 32 different languages — including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi.
The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, was first released in June in the US, UK, and Canada. It allows users to listen to PDFs, articles, newsletters, ePub files or “any other text content” according to the developer, but that support seemingly doesn’t extend to files from Kindle or Apple Books.
There’s a good selection of AI-generated voices available for the text-to-speech tool, including deceased celebrities like Judy Garland, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds. The few I’ve listened to are impressive enough to avoid sounding overly robotic. ElevenLabs said their respective heirs were “excited to see their’ legacies live on” at release, so these voices are presumably licensed.
The reader app is free to download and use, and won’t consume credits from the broader ElevenLabs web-based subscription plan. The company is, however, planning to “eventually launch some premium version of the app,” but is promising to have a “generous free plan” available when that happens.
