AI startups ElevenLabs and Parrot secure millions in funding for voice and court reporting platforms.
ElevenLabs, an AI-powered platform for creating synthetic voices, has raised $19 million in a Series A round co-led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Andreessen Horowitz. The company has also launched Projects, a workflow for editing and creating long-form spoken content, and an AI Speech Classifier to detect whether an uploaded audio sample contains AI-generated content from ElevenLabs. The company's AI text-to-speech models are language-agnostic, allowing corporate customers to fine-tune them and build their own, proprietary speech models on top. However, the platform has faced criticism for being exploited by bad actors to share hateful messages mimicking celebrities.