Pocket FM has partnered with ElevenLabs to leverage its text-to-voice AI tools, achieving a remarkable 90% reduction in production costs for audio series.
If you’re one of the millions of listeners who tune into the hit audio shows produced by Pocket FM, chances are you have been listening to non-human voices, or voices generated or cloned by artificial intelligence (AI), narrating your favorite shows. If not, you will surely be tuning into these AI Audio Series from now on.
India-based Entertainment startup Pocket FM has recently announced a partnership with New York-based ElevenLabs to use the latter’s extensive text-to-voice AI tools to turn text scripts into full-blown audio shows.
The Indian startup leads the spoken-words entertainment space in the US with its flagship audio series, which has transformed how listeners consume and engage with audio-based content. During the past several months, Pocket FM has been experimenting with the AI text-to-voice tools generated by New York-based ElevenLabs to produce its blockbuster audio shows.
Since partnering with ElevenLabs, Pocket FM has produced over 30,000 hours of audio content that has been distributed across all its markets, including the US and India. Following the success of this experiment, both companies announced their partnership last week.
With the partnership, Pocket FM’s portfolio of audio entertainment content — currently at over 100,000 hours and growing — will be poised to grow by more than three times over due to the lowered cost of production. According to a spokesperson for the India-based startup, initial tests with ElevenLabs’s AI technology showed promising results to reduce costs by as much as 90%.
However, cost reduction and technological advancements are not the only reasons for the fast-growing audio entertainment startup’s partnership with ElevenLabs. Through this new partnership, the two companies aim to democratize audio storytelling.
In a joint statement from Pocket FM and ElevenLabs, both startups expressed holding a shared belief that their partnership serves as a remarkable stepping stone toward ensuring every writer is given the opportunity to share their unique voice through the stories they create.
The alliance is intended to bring inclusivity, accessibility, and creativity within the writing community, helping them mass-produce high-quality audio shows quickly and easily. According to Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, joining forces with a content-producing powerhouse like Pocket FM will help lay the foundation for new standards in not only audio entertainment but also the entire entertainment industry.
Pocket FM co-founder and CTO Prateek Dixit also believes the alliance will turn Pocket FM’s large pool of writers into complete storytellers who will now be able to produce their own shows using voices and sound effects according to their personal choices across languages. He claims that providing his company’s team of writers with cutting-edge AI tools from ElevenLabs will not only streamline the process of producing hit audio content — from concept to launch — but also exemplify the potential of AI as a modern approach to storytelling for other writers around the world.
However, Dixit’s claim begs the question: will the modern integration of AI in the storytelling process eventually threaten the careers (and, therefore, livelihood) of human voice-over artists and narrators? The answer, he says, is actually the opposite.
According to Dixit, humans will still play a vital role in narrating and using their voice-over talents for Pocket FM’s episodic audio series. Additionally, integrating ElevenLabs’s AI toolkit into his company’s process of audio series production will assist both it and its team of writers in translating each series into various languages, including localized dialects with nuanced vocabularies and accents.
As Dixit explains, this approach will also help Pocket FM remain equipped with the innovation necessary for global expansion, beginning with Europe and Latin America. For now, however, readers can learn more about Pocket FM, its hit audio series, and its latest partnership with ElevenLabs by visiting the company’s website.