Lightspeed Ventures-backed audio platform Pocket FM has announced a partnership with voice cloning company ElevenLabs to quickly convert text content such as scripts into audio series using AI technology. Pocket FM, which successfully raised $103 million in Series D funding in March, revealed that they are experimenting with ElevenLabs' technology to achieve text-to-audio conversion. The Indian company has now expanded its collaboration with ElevenLabs and plans to provide this conversion tool to all creators in the coming weeks. During the testing phase, Pocket FM has already used ElevenLabs' AI technology to produce 30,000 hours of audio series. With the launch of the new tool, the company expects its library of audio content, which currently exceeds 100,000 hours, to triple in size this year. Pocket FM also stated that the AI tool helped them reduce audio production costs by 90%. Prateek Dixit, Co-founder and CTO of Pocket FM, stated that this partnership aims to help writers easily convert their works into audio series. "We have over 250,000 writers, including those on our Pocket Novel writing platform, and this collaboration reduces the cost of setting up and recording audio for them," he said. "Even with advanced recording tools and equipment, writers can only produce about 30 minutes of high-quality audio content per day. With the help of AI tools, this output can be increased tenfold," he added. Pocket FM has developed a tool integrated with ElevenLabs' technology, which provides 50 voice options for writers who want to convert their content into audio. Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder of ElevenLabs, stated that their tool can understand the context of writing and automatically express emotions through sound. "In collaboration with Pocket FM, we are deploying our new models, which have a better understanding of writing genres and excel in emotional expression," Staniszewski said. Dixit also revealed that based on user interaction data with this type of content, the platform plans to recommend suitable voices for specific genres of writers. Pocket FM is not the only audio platform using AI-driven tools. Google-backed Kuku FM is also utilizing tools such as GPT-4, Claude, BandLab, and even ElevenLabs to assist writers in various stages of creation, including script refinement, generating thumbnails, adding sound effects, and converting text to audio. Kuku FM stated that they are also experimenting with visual generation tools like Midjourney and Runway to create content-related advertisements. Although AI-driven tools promise to generate more content faster, content quality and their impact on artists remain important issues. Pocket FM assists in the discovery and presentation of high-quality content by making the discovery algorithm more complex and encouraging user participation. "If a writer releases an audio series, we present it to a certain number of users and observe engagement metrics. If these metrics are positive, we further promote it," Dixit said. The application of AI may help these platforms achieve their goals faster and expand their content libraries, but it may also reduce the role of voice actors collaborating with them. The All India Dubbing Artists Association (AVA) has expressed concerns about AI's involvement. "If AI takes over completely, we're finished. As voice actors, we need to establish some regulations to protect our livelihoods," said Amarinder Singh Sodhi, Secretary-General of the AVA, to Indian media Scroll. Sodhi also told Scroll that some voice actors were called to recording studios to record samples for training AI without their consent or knowledge. "On an emotional level, this scares me. Using AI essentially dilutes the human experience of storytelling. You lose emotional connection," said Delhi-based voice actor Aditya Mattoo to TechCrunch. He also added that providing high-quality voices to those who lack taste and skills in producing quality content will result in the market being flooded with inferior content. When asked about the impact of AI-driven voice generation on Pocket FM, the company did not directly answer the question. However, Dixit pointed out that in their experiments, the engagement of AI-generated content is "as good as human voice production." It is worth noting that the company is also developing technology to incorporate multiple voices into a single audio output. Currently, neither Pocket FM nor Kuku FM label their content to indicate whether AI was used in the creation process.