ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is an AI voice technology company founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski, former Google and Palantir engineers. The company has quickly become the industry leader in AI voice synthesis, offering the most natural-sounding text-to-speech and voice cloning technology available.

ElevenLabs' platform can generate human-quality speech in 32 languages, clone voices from just a few minutes of audio, and create entirely new synthetic voices. The technology is used for audiobook production, video dubbing, podcast creation, accessibility tools, and interactive AI applications. ElevenLabs' API serves thousands of developers building voice-enabled AI products.

The company has raised over $100 million and launched a suite of products including Voice Library (a marketplace of AI voices), Projects (long-form content creation), and Dubbing (automatic video translation with voice matching). ElevenLabs competes with OpenAI's TTS, Amazon Polly, and Google Cloud TTS, but is widely regarded as producing the most expressive, natural-sounding AI speech available.

ElevenLabs has become the underlying voice technology for a growing list of consumer-distribution surfaces. The most prominent integration is Spotify for Authors, where ElevenLabs powers AI audiobook narration for self-publishing authors — Spotify pitches the integration as a "more expressive and human-like" upgrade to its earlier Google Play Books partnership. The arrangement is non-exclusive: authors generate audiobooks inside Spotify's tooling but are free to distribute the resulting files on any platform. The deal puts ElevenLabs voices directly inside the largest audio platform's self-publishing funnel and validates the broader pattern of ElevenLabs as the de-facto voice layer for major AI audio products, alongside its existing roles in Spotify's Studio AI agent, ChatGPT voice, and a long tail of indie podcast, game, and accessibility deployments.