AI company securing permissions from stars to use their voices from the Great Beyond

The estates of some stars who have already passed on — including Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds — have made deals that may soon have them reading you your next audiobook.

That’s what CNBC is reporting regarding a company called ElevenLabs, an audio technology startup that “has penned multiple deals with the estates of legendary actors for its IconicVoices tool.”

Using just 30 minutes’ worth of audio from a given celebrity — including the aforementioned stars, as well as James Dean and Laurence Olivier — the tool can create an AI-generated voice of that celeb to read to a user via an audiobook app.

Sam Sklar, a member of ElevenLabs’ team, says that a voice “can be called upon to read text (articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or other text content),” but that a celeb’s voice can’t be exported outside the app.

The latter caveat was meant to calm the nerves of stars who lobbied during 2023’s Hollywood strikes against AI replication of their work.