ElevenLabs' text-to-speech app Reader is now available globally

ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, is making its Reader app available across the world with support for 32 languages.

The app, first released in June in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, lets users upload any text content — like articles, PDF documents or e-books — and listen to it in different languages and voices. Reader now supports languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, Italian, Tamil and Swedish.

ElevenLabs, which became a unicorn earlier this year after raising $80 million from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, provides an API that companies can use for various use cases like dubbing or text-to-speech. The company powers voice interactions on the Rabbit r1, as well as text-to-speech features on AI-powered search engine Perplexity and audio platforms Pocket FM and Kuku FM. The Reader app is its first consumer-facing product.

The startup said it has added hundreds of new voices from its library that are suited for different languages. Last month, the company licensed the voices of actors such as Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier for the app.

ElevenLabs said the extended language support is powered by its Turbo v2.5 model, released last month, which purportedly reduces the latency of text-to-speech conversion and improves quality.

The Reader app’s closest rival is Speechify, which offers additional features like scanning documents for text, integrations with Gmail and Canvas, as well as letting users clone their own voice to read out text. Mozilla-owned Pocket and The New York Times’ Audm-based audio app also let users listen to content.

ElevenLabs said it would add more features to the app, such as offline support and the ability to share audio snippets.