ElevenLabs Reader: AI Audio

it's showing coming soon for me. Is it my location?

I've had the Reader in the UK for months and earlier today it was in the App Store, I was looking for there new app that I had heard about - didn't find that.

Can you use the voices to read? E books or Books on your Kindle.

I've just downloaded the app on my phone, gonna see what its like, and hopefully they will expand the features over time.

@Assistive Intellegence Yes, the basic reader. First I tried searching for it in the app store, and then I clicked on the link given here. the same result either time.

I've yet to listen to the associated podcast episode or download this app, but it looks great. I've heard several of the Eleven Labs voices and they're great. This leads me to my question. Would the trick described recently in another thread on here work for making this app more accessible? I'm referring to the long-press on an inaccessible button or other element. In any case, I'm most definitely going to grab myself a copy of this app at some point.

Looks like other people are finding it. I can't even remember where my phone thinks it is, I've been playing with the VPN to see what adds are like around the world! Dog food in spanish was getting old!

I don’t often say this but Wow. I enjoy writing short stories every once in a while and I plugged in one of my stories and had the different voices reading them and I’m totally amazed. I kept thinking “I wrote this?” It is like having your own audiobook reader reading the story. If you are having problems importing a file from the File app, you can copy the text, go into the Reader app, hit Import button then the Write Text button then paste your text. The Reader app saves it after that and you don’t have to copy and paste again. You can then switch to other voices. On the More button I see an option to Share but that is dimmed out. I hope I will eventually be able to share with family and friends with my story being read by one of the voices. If anybody knows why this is dimmed out and if you figure it out would appreciate an explanation.
Regards
Danny

The voices are nice. I deleted my account though as I wouldn't use this app.

I really really don't like that once you delete an account with this company; your email is still kept on their survers, or at least something is that makes it so you can't use your email again to sign up to them.

Oh well, I can't see myself using their website anymore anyway apart from through an API.

I tryed to download the app in this afternoon, but it'll be available on Türkiye's App store on july 11. I have somethings to try with this app, I'm really curious about this.

It says 'Expected on 11 June" here on Turkey's App Store.

As for the voices, I was impressed by the lifelike quality I experienced when experimenting with them on their website. For example, Nicole's voice would be well-suited for reading content intended for relaxation and meditation, or any material that's suitable for being delivered with a soft and soothing tone.

I haven't downloaded it but listened to the podcast. a couple of questions:

1. are all the voices North american dialects? nothing against North american dialects of course - great if I'm reading John Grisham - but I'd like an English accent for my PG Wodehouse.

2. Is it really true that if you enter back into a book having read, say, 25 percent, that 25 percent is gone for evermore in that you can't rewind back to the beginning? thomas speculates that this is intentional. If so, why? Has the developer never fallen asleep listening to a story before? I'm sorry, but good though the voices might be, this is an absolute deal-breaker from a Bingo perspective. I don't want an app deciding for me that something is insufficiently interesting to reread.

And one last thing - it supports text files - this has been said several times now. Does that mean it does not support RTF, MS Word, etc. or do such things come under the text files umbrella, or umberella if you prefer?

His family took the cash, it wasn't stolen. Some other famous voices to. And there are lots of different accents, lots of English, don't remember if there are Scottish and Welsh, there are so many.

Dear Arthur, Dear, sweet Arthur, we are delighted to bestow upon you this apple corer, as a token of the esteem in which we hold you in. That would be rahter fun! Count arthur strong himself would also be good.

I downloaded the app today. Firstly, does this app use your character you have into your elevenlabs account or are the characters unlimited when using the app? Secondly, I tried importing an epub file, either from Google Drive and then downloaded locally on my iPhone, but it said error making read document. We've been notified and are investing the issue.
Also I think that the app uses only monolingual voices, and it does not support the latest multilingual text-to-speech: when importing a wikipedia article in Italian, the app read it with an English accent.

I imported the short story Cookie Jar by Stephen King and it read the words, but it put pauses where they didn't belong. I tried this with several voices -- some were better than others, but all exhibited this problem. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Would be nice if one could share the audio produced from this app and use the audio to read in another app that has more extensive and sophisticated navigation and bookmarking capabilities. Without those extra capabilities I would get very frustrated reading anything longer than a minute or two in duration.

--Pete

No, I do not mean that Sir Lawrence Olivier refuses to take an oath or affirm. I have no evidence either way on that point. what I mnean is Sir Lawrence Olivier refuses to utter expletives. Instead, he makes a sound kind of similar to clearing his throat in a rather embarrassed way. Bloody he will do, Sodding is fine, but get to the harder stuff and he's having none of it. Don't ask him to talk about ahem freezing over, for example. That is rather silly, isn't it? Rules him out of reading many books. I don't know if it's the same with any other of the voices.

I agree sharing audio would be nice if this app is not to have anything other than the most primitive navigation capabilities I have ever seen. It's a shame about that aspect, as in so many ways this app is very good and i can see its being a pleasant reading experience to use.

Same voice as I've used before. Now it seems rubbish! Stuttering and stopping. I was very surprised - previously this had been an amazing experience.

I'll try again with another document, but seriously?

Hello everyone,
I have a paid plan from Eleven Labs, and I put a lot of effort into creating my voice with 6 sample files. When I use this app, I notice a lot of dips in volume, and tone changes that makes enjoying the flow of a story a little tricky. Have you guys noticed this with the voices you may be using?
To give a little sample of what I'm talking about, feel free to listen to this story I wrote and is currently in revision to hopefully be submitted somewhere. It's a cute ghost story set in the early 80s told from the point of view of a 10-year old girl who travels with her dad on his trucking route. Obviously, the voice settings can be configured on the Eleven Labs site, but I can't upload my complete story up there due to the limitations of my plan, so I thought I'd give it a go on the Reader app. For those wishing to input content from a file not supported, simply open the file in another app, and do a copy/paste when you choose the write text option. I used Ulysses to do this, since the story was originally written in the app, but use whichever app works for you.
Most of you may be familiar with my voice because I've hosted a few podcasts episodes submitted here,and I'm sure you've heard me on social media. I'm energetic and full of character, whereas this voice makes me sound monotone. The main thing that gets me about the app though is the fluxuating volume and subtle shifts into more treble-ish tone back to mid and so on. Maybe it's my nitpicky brain getting in the way, but I do wish the voices would be a bit more consistent.
Here's a link to the audio if you want to listen to what I'm getting at. I hooked my phone to my mixer and recorded it through gold wave. The audio was even lower than what you'll hear, but there are still those changes. If anything, I hope the story is an entertaining read. You can contact me on Mastodon at desertstar84@chatwithus.live if you want to chat about the story itself. :)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kwlrs9t4964jhyetqxkgz/The-Tortoise-of-Interstate-44.mp3?rlkey=xri9dve0et5w0smjtm5c23zh8&dl=0

Let me know what you think about voice stability. Am I just crazy? In any event, I hope you all have a lovely day.

Hi Melissa,

First, you have a lovely voice. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. As for the voice dipping, I did notice it a bit in your sample above. As I have very little experience/knowledge with regards to audio engineering, I cannot really tell you what, if anything, can be done about this.

Overall, your story sample was an interesting and enjoyable listen. As i like this particular genre, I would definitely read/listen to the finished product, audio or otherwise.

As for synthesizing ones own voice, this kind of reminds me of what is going on with Audible.com lately, with their "VirtualVoice" audio books. While I cannot say whether or not they too utilize ElevenLabs,or their own proprietary software, I can say the Virtual Voice books seem to suffer this same issue of volume drops and monotonous speech.

Best of luck with your book journey. Sounds like you have the makings of winner. 😊👍

A few weeks ago, I was successfully able to import and read TXT and PDF files with this app, but for the last few days, when I've attempted to share files with the app, after selecting this app from the share sheet, focus immediately returns to the app from which I shared the file, and the files do not seem to have been imported into the ElevenLabs Reader app.

I’ve noticed the same thing here too; I see this bug as well!

one question:
can I use these voices for the voice over?

No, you can't.

Maybe VoiceOver will be able to use more natural-sounding voices down the track as onboard processing for AI develops.

I have the M2 mac, so is there anyway I can get this to work?

Importing a file still has the "Error making read document" message. How can this app be considered useful if I can't even import a book to read? And when will it be fixed? I think this is a major problem.

Hello labs reader team, this is Kaushik from India. Nowadays Indians are purchasing all Apple products and looking for most accessible PDF readers. If you could do include reading of Indian regional languages in a natural human voice, then you will add a great advantage in our technical daily life, so I request you to include and take this suggestion. Thank you.

This app is back to its best. It was playing up, a lot, but not anymore.

The celebrity voices have gotten even weirder - I didn't know Deepak Chopra was dead, bubt here he is...

I have a PDF file. How can I import it into the app? Every time I try it, I keep getting an error message, with the app saying that they're going to look into the problem

That was happening to me. Recently it just started working again. Don't know why, but it is perfect again.

the Forward and Back buttons behave in weird ways: you’ll never know where they’ll take you.
Furthermore, it’s pretty difficult to know the remaining time especially if it is a book, unless you use screen recognition.

Deepak Chopra ain't dead! I don't think the celebrity voices work that way. It's not a collection of voices who's original owners have passed on. I think it's more like if you're a celebrity and if you want to give rights to your voice, you can do so.
Also 2 Indian languages are available-Hindi and Tamil... But then yeah, more'd be really nice...

I haven't bothered with this app since i had Sir Lawrence Olivier read out a passage in wich he presented an apple corer as an award. Very useful things, apple corers, although you do need to watch your thumb with them, in my experience. I made a French apple tart the other day, using the Mary Berry recipe, and...but I digress. My question is this: does this app still stubbornly refuse either to let you reread parts of a file you read last time you had the app open, or alternatively to share the audio to an app that has proper rewinding functionality such as Voicedream? If the answer to either of these is still yes, then beyond getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to present judy Garland with a hand blender for her services to acting, there doesn't seem much point.