Lightspeed projectsSupported audio platform Jeep FM It announced that it has partnered with an audio cloning company Eleven laboratories Quickly convert textual content, such as a script, into an audio string using artificial intelligence.
Jeep FMwhich sparked $103 million in Series D funding in Marchtold TechCrunch at the time that it was already testing the ability to convert text content to audio using Eleven laboratories‘ Technique. Now, the India-based company has expanded the partnership to make the conversion tool available to all creators over the next few weeks.
In the testing phase, Pocket FM has already produced 30,000 hours of audio series using ElevenLab’s AI technology. With the new release, the startup expects to triple its content library of over 100,000 hours of audio content this year. Pocket FM also said that during the pilot phase, AI-powered tools helped it reduce the cost of audio production by 90%.
Pocket FM co-founder and CTO Prateek Dixit told TechCrunch over a phone call that through this partnership, the company wants to make it easier for writers to turn their writing into an audio series.
“We have over 250,000 writers (including those on the company’s pocket novel writing platform) and this partnership reduces the cost of preparing and recording audio for them,” he said.
“Even with a good set of recording tools and equipment, writers can produce approximately 30 minutes of high-quality audio content per day. Using AI tools, this output can be ten times more.”
Pocket FM has built a tool that integrates ElevenLabs’ technology, through which it offers 50 voices to writers who want to convert their content. Matej Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, said his company’s tool understands the context of writing and automatically infers emotions through audio.
“By working with Pocket FM, we are deploying our newest models that better understand the type of writing and are emotional,” Staniszewski said.
Dixit noted that based on data derived from users’ engagement with this type of content, the platform also plans to suggest voices that work well for writers in a particular genre.
Pocket FM isn’t the only audio chain platform experimenting with AI-powered tools. Coco FM powered by Google She uses GPT-4, Claude, BandLab, and even ElevenLabs to help her writers in various stages of creation, including enhancing text, creating thumbnails, adding sound effects, and converting text to audio.
Kuku FM told TechCrunch that it is also experimenting with using visual creation tools like Midjourney and Runway to create content-relevant ads.
The quality of the content and its impact on artists
The promise of AI-powered tools is to create more content faster, but that doesn’t mean the content is good. Pocket FM’s answer to helping discover and highlight quality content is to make its discovery algorithm sophisticated and experiment with user engagement.
“If a writer publishes an audio series, we show that content to a select number of users and monitor engagement metrics. If those metrics are positive, we push that further,” Dixit said.
Kuku FM said it works with its quality control team to ensure only high-quality content is promoted on its app, even if creators use artificial intelligence in the process.
“We have realized the importance of having a human quality control team at the heart of our decision-making process when it comes to producing audio content. We have developed a core team of content producers who have high ownership and authority regarding standards,” said Lal Chand Bisu, co-founder and CEO of the company. “Technical.”
Using AI could lead to faster results and a larger content library for these platforms, but it will also reduce the roles of the voiceover artists who work with them. The Association of Voice Over Artists of India (AVA) has expressed concerns about AI taking over.
“If AI takes over, we will be finished. As vocal artists, we need to put some regulation in place so that our livelihoods are protected,” said Amarinder Singh Sodhi, general secretary of the association. He told the Indian publication Scroll.
Sodi also told Scroll about incidents in which voiceover artists were called into the studio to record samples for AI training without getting their consent or informing them.
“On an emotional level, it scares me. By using AI, you fundamentally dilute the human experience of storytelling. You lose the emotional connection,” Aditya Mattu, a Delhi-based voice-over artist, told TechCrunch.
He added that providing access to distinguished voices to people who do not have the taste and skill to produce high-quality content will lead to flooding the market with bad content.
Voice artists in Other parts From the world also raised concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on their jobs. Despite working with some AI companies, they feel uncomfortable about changing their voices.
When we asked about the impact of AI-powered audio generation on Pocket FM, the company did not directly answer the question. However, Dixit noted that the interaction with AI-generated content in his experiments is “as good as human voiceover production.” It is worth noting that the company is also working on a technology to combine multiple sounds into a single audio output.
Pocket FM and Kuku FM do not currently label their content to indicate whether AI has been used in the creation process.