ElevenLabs strike deals with celebs to create AI audio (techcrunch.com)

ElevenLabs announced deals with several high-profile performers and the launch of a marketplace that lets brands license authorized AI-generated celebrity voices. The company says the marketplace will include names such as Michael Caine, Liza Minnelli and the estate of Dr. Maya Angelou, and it highlighted a use case from investor Matthew McConaughey, who will use his ElevenLabs AI voice to translate and narrate his newsletter into Spanish. The move follows other mainstream voice offerings (e.g., Meta’s celebrity-sounding assistants) and positions ElevenLabs — an AI audio unicorn backed by a16z and ICONIQ — as a hub for licensed synthetic speech. For the AI/ML community this signals wider commercial adoption of voice-cloning and text-to-speech pipelines paired with automated translation, plus business models based on explicit licensing and revenue for talent. Technically, it underscores progress in high-fidelity neural TTS and cross-lingual voice rendering but also raises product and research priorities: robust consent and rights management, provenance and watermarking to detect synthetic audio, mitigation of misuse, and standards for attribution and royalties. The marketplace model could accelerate branded audio content and localization, while intensifying legal, ethical and detection challenges that will shape future tool design and policy.