Generative AI company ElevenLabs has hired the team behind Omnivore, an open source read-later app.
Omnivore co-founders Jackson Harper and Hongbu Wu said in a blog post that joining Eleven Labs will give them “an even bigger platform to create accessible and engaging experiences for our passionate readers.” said.
“Eleven Labs is committed to our developer community, and the Omnivore codebase remains 100% open source to all users,” Harper and Wu wrote. “This decision ensures that the broader development community can continue to build and improve Omnivore’s technology.”
Omnivore users can export their data until November 16th, after which it will be deleted.
Harper and Wu launched Omnivore in 2021 with the goal of building a read-later solution for, in their words, “text lovers.” Mr. Wu and Mr. Harper previously worked together at credit scoring company Juvo. Mr. Harper was responsible for data engineering.
Omnivore is a fully featured platform with features such as highlighting, PDF and offline support, apps for the web, iOS, and Android, and extensions for all major web browsers. Omnivore also provides text-to-speech functionality using Eleven Labs' speech generation API.
Omnivorous app experience. Image credit: Omnivore
“We learned about ElevenLabs by integrating their hyper-realistic AI voices into Omnivore,” Harper and Wu wrote. “Hearing articles and books with Eleven Lab audio quickly became one of Omnivore’s most popular features.”
With the move to Eleven Labs, Harper and Wu said they will invest development efforts in Eleven Labs' own reader app, Eleven Reader. (In fact, they say they've already shipped a “valuable update” to Eleven Reader.) Released earlier this year, Eleven Reader lets users upload articles, PDFs, and e-books, and download them in a variety of languages and audio formats. You can hear them on . Voices of actors such as Judy Garland and James Dean.
It has been speculated that some of Omnivore's features will eventually be incorporated into Eleven Reader.
“Our team is joining Eleven Lab to help Eleven Leaders drive the future of accessible reading and listening,” Harper and Wu said. “We are working hard to ensure an accessible and bright future for our readers around the world.”
Eleven Labs, which became a unicorn earlier this year after raising $80 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, will generate most of its revenue through AI tools that generate synthetic voices for audiobook narration and video dubbing. Earn money with language. TechCrunch reported this month that backers have approached the company about a new round of funding that could value the company at about $3 billion.