#088 ElevenLabs Becomes a Billion-Dollar Voice Cloning Startup, Meet Rabbit R1: The AI Gadget That Uses Perplexity AI To Answer Any Question
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AI BYTE #1 📢: ElevenLabs Becomes a Billion-Dollar Voice Cloning Startup
⭐ Voice cloning is the process of creating synthetic voices that sound like real people, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It has many applications in entertainment, education, marketing, and accessibility, but it also poses ethical and social challenges.
One of the leading companies in this field is ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that was founded in 2022 by two Polish entrepreneurs, Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski. They were inspired by the poor quality of dubbing in American movies and decided to create a better solution using AI.
ElevenLabs offers a browser-based platform that allows anyone to generate realistic voices in more than 25 languages, with different accents, emotions, and styles. Users can either choose from a library of pre-made voices or upload their own voice samples to create custom voice clones. The platform also provides tools for editing, mixing, and exporting audio files.
The startup has attracted customers from various industries, such as gaming, publishing, media, and education. Some of its notable clients include Paradox Interactive, Storytel, and The Washington Post. ElevenLabs also plans to expand into dubbing movies and TV shows, as well as creating AI actors and characters.
On Monday, ElevenLabs announced that it raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.
The round also had participation from Sequoia Capital, Smash Capital, SV Angel, BroadLight Capital, and Credo Ventures. This brings ElevenLabs’ total funding to $101 million and values the company at over $1 billion, making it one of the few AI startups to achieve unicorn status.
According to Staniszewski, the new capital will be used to improve the product, expand the team, invest in AI research, and enhance safety measures to ensure responsible and ethical development of voice technology.
He said that the company is working with the entertainment industry and talent agencies to address the concerns around voice cloning and intellectual property rights. He also said that the company is developing a voice marketplace, where users can generate AI voices and monetize them by licensing them to others.
ElevenLabs is not the only player in the voice cloning market. There are other competitors, such as Resemble AI, Lovo, and Descript, that offer similar services.
However, ElevenLabs claims to have an edge over them in terms of quality, diversity, and scalability of its voices.
The company also boasts of having a strong AI research team, led by Dabkowski, who is a former Google machine learning engineer.
AI BYTE #2 📢: Meet Rabbit R1: The AI Gadget That Uses Perplexity AI To Answer Any Question
⭐ One of the standout gadgets of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Rabbit R1, will use Perplexity AI’s tech to answer user queries, both companies said in an announcement.
The first 100,000 R1 buyers will get one year of Perplexity Pro for free.
The $200 R1 made rounds at the CES show as an AI-first gadget that saves you the hassle of taking your phone out for tasks like performing web searches, playing a song on Spotify, and ordering a cab. The device doesn’t have a monthly subscription fee at the moment.
The device, designed by Teenage Engineering, has a 2.88-inch touchscreen, a push-to-talk button, a camera, a speaker, and two mics. The company has already sold 50,000 devices in pre-orders.
It opened pre-orders for the 6th production batch with another 50,000 devices. Rabbit said that customers living in the EU and UK will all receive their device by the end of July even if they just pre-order a device from the 6th batch.
Perplexity uses a mix of its own AI model as well as third-party models — Google’s Claude 2.1, Anthropic’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s GPT-4 — to get accurate information from the web. The tool has a chatbot interface on the web and mobile apps to let users ask questions in natural language.
While Perplexity’s solution is different than traditional search engines, it competes with Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Copilot along with You.com in the GenAI search space.
Perplexity raised $100 million in Series A funding — at a $520 million valuation — led by IVP with additional investments from NEA, Databricks Ventures, Nvidia, former Twitter VP Elad Gil, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, and Jeff Bezos.
The partnership between Rabbit and Perplexity is a significant one, as it showcases how AI can be used to create a more natural and intuitive way of interacting with technology. Instead of relying on apps, menus, and buttons, users can simply ask the R1 device what they want to know or do, and the device will use Perplexity’s answer engine to provide the best response.
The R1 device also features a Large Action Model (LAM), which enables it to perform tasks like booking rides, finding recipes, identifying objects, or fact-checking. The device can also translate between languages, play music, and generate content using Perplexity’s generative AI capabilities.
The Rabbit R1 is not meant to replace your smartphone, but rather to complement it and offer a more convenient and efficient way of accessing information and services.
The device is also designed to be fun and friendly, with a 360-degree rotatable camera that acts as an eye and a scroll wheel that acts as a nose.
The Rabbit R1 is expected to ship in March or April to US and Canada customers, and later in 2024 to other regions.
The device is available for pre-order on the Rabbit website for $199. If you are interested in getting a pocket-sized AI assistant that can answer any question, you might want to check out the Rabbit R1 and see what Perplexity AI can do for you.