AI Alert: ElevenLabs' $19M Boost & New Detection Tech

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Today on the podcast, I'm going to be covering one of my favorite AI tools because they just announced they raised$19 million and that is 11 Labs.

0:38If you haven't used them before, 11 Labs is a tool that allows you to put text and it will generate audio for you. And the reason why I think this is an impressive company and the reason why I love them so much is because it's, you know, there's quite a few text to audio AIs out there, but it's very hard to find one where the voice sounds very realistic and is usable. So in addition to be able to do that, 11 Labs is one of the only ones that I've found that has a really powerful AI voice trainer. Essentially, you can put in five minutes of you talking or even one minute of you talking, record yourself, put it into their platform, and they will train an AI model based off of that.

1:17And you can generate content in your own voice. I've actually used this before. It's a really powerful tool. And so today on the podcast, I'm going to be diving into what exactly they've done their story, which is absolutely fascinating, and how they were able to raise this$19 million. So the first thing to know is that this is technically their Series A round. This is a very new company, and this$19 million that they have raised in their Series A is led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, along with Andresen Horwitz. And they also have Creative Ventures, SV Angel, the co-founder of Instagram, Mike Krieger, the Oculus co-founder, Brendan Iriebe, DeepMind and Inflection AI co-founder, Mustafa Suleiman, and O 'Reilly media founder, Tim O 'Reilly.

2:06So they have some really big names backing them on this round. They went straight for a very institutional, very traditional Silicon Valley approach for this raise. And it's pretty impressive. they have a valuation of$99 million post money after they've raised this, which is a pretty respectable amount. The CEO, Mattie, he talking about this round of funding said this investment will be used to continue building 11 labs cutting edge research hub for voice AI and to launch a range of additional products to support specific market verticals such as publishing, gaming, entertainment and conversational applications.

2:41So 11 labs has made a lot of headlines over the last few months. Some, you know, reasons have been good, some have been bad. The founders actually both come from tech. Swartzky, he previously worked at Palantir, and then his friend Piotr worked at Google. And they're both from Poland. And actually, they were inspired to create this because of the really mediocre dubbing of American movies that they watched growing up. And they decided they could do something better, especially if they leveraged AI in order to make, you know, better audio and dubbing for movies and other platforms. Something I think is amazing about this project and this company is that they only have 15 people working.

3:26But with this new round, this new series A, they're planning on launching projects, which essentially is a workflow for editing and creating kind of more long form spoken content. And so with that users are gonna be able to generate dialogue segments and even audiobooks without having to leave the platform So it's gonna become quite powerful right now. It's a very Basic platform you can go there's like a text box you plug it in and it gives you your audio file You can plug in one of your audio files will train a voice and then that's a drop-down option But it's very basic at the moment although they have been releasing a bunch of new products kind of as they coincide with the launch of this, and they have a whole bunch more planned.

4:06The CEO said, for business-to-business partners, our technology can be used in areas such as scalable and multilingual audiobook creation, voice characters in video games, voice digital articles, voicing digital articles, supporting the visually impaired to access online written content, and powering AI radio. So they launched in beta in late January, and they've really been picking up steam since then. And a lot of this I just believe is due to the fact that they have really high quality voices that they've generated. I've tried a number of different platforms. This is definitely one of my favorite.

4:41And they have an option that you can actually generate this on a pretty generous free tier. So I think that has helped them to grow quite a lot. Apparently, they have over 1 million users. Now they have had a bit of controversy. Obviously, this is an incredible platform. I've used it for a lot of really great use cases, but there is the problem with, you know, cloning people's voices and using that for scams and for spam. So they've really tried to crack down on that. One of the things they've done similar to mid journeys, they made it so the voice cloning feature is only available if you are a paying customer.

5:17Now, what this actually does that a lot of people don't know is if you're it's not just you know, like, oh, less people are willing to, like spammers aren't going to pay because of course spammers could pay. but the reason why it's important to have a tool like that being paid is because it's not just that the spammer or whoever might be paying for that it's that they have to hook up a credit card and they have to have an address verified on their account so you know of course you know they're stolen credit cards and all sorts of terrible things that a spammer can do but the likelihood of being able to do that at scale is way more difficult and so by being able to you know track people's credit card data and their you know address and name and have that verified through essentially the payment processor if there is anything illegal being done they are able to you know just as any crime would they can report that to the authorities and the authorities can look into it and you know track down the data so that's one thing they've done that i think is a good idea in addition they've launched a ai voice detection tool called ai speech classifier and it's also available as an API to some of their selected partners.

6:25But it's designed to detect whether an uploaded audio sample contains AI-generated content from 11 Labs. And I hope to see more tools like this based out of all of the different AI-generated platforms. It would be really awesome to, you know, I think for forensic, for the police, and for all sorts of things to be able to upload the audio file and, you know, track down and tell which audios were actually, you know, created by AI and which were not. I think that will help a lot in the future and maybe even have some sort of disclaimer. I think inevitably and eventually all AI content is probably going to have to have similar to how, you know, when you're looking at an Instagram post or a YouTube video and it says, you know, this is a sponsored post.

7:06They're legally required to say that. I think we're going to have to legally be required to say this is AI generated on content in the future. So it doesn't mean that necessarily is going to kill AI content or, you know, devalue it. but I think it's important to know and to be aware so that people to people understand, you know, where they're where this content is coming from, or what was actually creating it to begin with. So I think that's going to be something interesting that we're going to see more of in the future. And I think that 11 labs is really well positioned to lead the charge in that AI transparency space and to really revolutionize the way that text to audio is done, especially with their voice cloning tools.

7:44So this is going to be a company that is going to to be really interesting to follow into the future.