ElevenLabs just secured an $80M Series B round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, officially crossing into unicorn territory. Alongside the cash infusion, the voice AI leader unveiled Dubbing Studio for full-length films, a marketplace that lets creators monetize their verified AI voices, and an upcoming mobile reader app.
Samsung just unveiled the Galaxy S24 lineup, packing Google's Gemini models directly into its latest flagships. The devices feature Circle to Search, real-time call translation, and generative photo editing powered by both on-device and cloud AI. It is a major push to put everyday generative AI tools into the hands of millions.
Adobe just introduced new AI-powered audio editing features to the Premiere Pro public beta, including smart category tagging and interactive fade handles on the timeline. Its popular Enhanced Speech tool, which automatically scrubs background noise from dialogue, will roll out to all users in February.
Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan's party just used ElevenLabs to clone his voice for a four-minute campaign speech from behind bars. The virtual rally, generated from his shorthand notes and archive clips, pulled over 500,000 views on YouTube and led the Pakistani government to throttle major social platforms nationwide. Why it matters: Synthetic media is now officially a political workaround against state suppression.
Meta just released an interactive demo for Audiobox, its new foundation research model for audio generation. The playground allows users to test zero-shot TTS, generate custom sound effects from text, and experiment with audio infilling. It gives creators an early hands-on look at Meta's generative audio capabilities.
Meta just released Seamless, an open-source translation system designed to sound more human. It includes SeamlessStreaming, which translates mid-sentence with just two seconds of latency, and SeamlessExpressive, which preserves your tone, rhythm, and emotion across languages. The entire model family and alignment tools are now public.
ElevenLabs just launched ElevenLabs Grants to give early-stage startups 11 million free text and dubbing characters per month for three months. To qualify, companies must have fewer than 25 employees and detail their AI voice integration plans, with the company distributing over 100 billion characters in the first wave.
AWS just upgraded its Amazon Transcribe speech-to-text platform with a foundation model trained on millions of hours of unlabeled audio. The update expands coverage from 39 to 100 spoken languages, improves accuracy by 20 to 50 percent, and auto-summarizes customer service calls.
OpenAI just made ChatGPT's voice conversation feature completely free for all mobile users. Instead of paying for Plus, anyone can now tap the headphones icon in the mobile app to talk out loud with the chatbot and get spoken answers. In a cheeky nod to its wild board drama, OpenAI's announcement demo jokingly calculated pizza orders for 778 hungry employees.
Amazon just announced it is laying off hundreds of employees in its Alexa and Fire TV unit to refocus resources on generative AI. An internal memo stated the cuts span the U.S., Canada, and India, as the company prioritizes smarter conversational features over legacy smart-assistant investments.
Microsoft just launched a photorealistic text-to-speech avatar tool in Azure AI Speech, alongside a personal voice feature that clones voices from a one-minute audio sample. Users can turn still photos and scripts into talking videos. To curb abuse, Microsoft restricts custom avatars and voice cloning behind strict approval forms and automatic watermarks.
Adobe just demoed Project Sound Lift, an experimental AI tool that splits a single audio recording into distinct layers like speech, applause, laughter, and traffic noise. Editors can drop the separated tracks directly into Premiere Pro to balance levels. It's still an early "Sneak" prototype, so public availability isn't guaranteed.
Meta just introduced Audiobox, an audio generation model that creates speech, sound effects, and ambient soundscapes using natural language prompts. It allows creators to combine voice samples with text prompts to restyle voices across different emotions and environments. The model is currently limited to select academic researchers alongside an interactive demo.
ElevenLabs just rolled out Turbo v2, cutting speech generation latency down to around 400ms—more than twice as fast as its first-gen models. It keeps quality matching Multilingual V2 and adds mulaw 8kHz output for VoIP, making near-instant voice agents feel much closer to real time.
Doritos just rolled out Doritos Silent, a free AI-powered Windows app designed to mute your snack crunching during voice chats. Developed with Smooth Technology over six months of analyzing crunch audio, the software acts as a mic filter to stop you from annoying your teammates mid-game. Why it matters: It turns brand marketing into a genuinely fun piece of utility for PC gamers.
Scarlett Johansson is taking legal action against developer Convert Software after its app, Lisa AI, used an unauthorized clone of her voice in an ad. The promo spliced real footage with an AI voice pitching features behind a flimsy disclaimer. Stars are finally drawing a line against deepfake ads.
ElevenLabs just launched a unified enterprise AI voice platform split into two engines: ElevenAgents for customer-facing bots and ElevenCreative for high-fidelity audio production. It integrates out of the box with tools like Salesforce and Zendesk, giving companies an easy path to deploy voice agents at scale.
The Beatles just announced that their final collaborative track, “Now and Then,” is dropping on November 2nd. Using the machine learning tech developed for Peter Jackson’s Get Back docuseries, producers successfully isolated John Lennon’s vocals from an unreleased 1970s demo cassette. It’s a remarkable showcase of AI unearthing lost music history without faking it.
Boston Dynamics just turned its Spot robot into an autonomous tour guide by wiring it up to ChatGPT, Whisper, and BLIP-2. The quadruped can now inspect its surroundings, navigate on the fly, and banter with visitors in whatever persona it is assigned—including a sarcastic guide. Why it matters: It shows how foundation models can give physical robots commonsense reasoning, even if a 6-second latency and hallucinations remain pain points.
D-ID just launched its mobile app on iOS and Android, bringing its viral AI video tech straight to smartphones. Users can upload a photo, type a script in 119 languages with customizable emotional tones, and generate talking videos up to 10 minutes long. Subscriptions start at $5.99 a month with a 14-day free trial.
