ElevenLabs has hired the team behind Omnivore, a reader app

Generative AI audio company ElevenLabs has hired the team behind Omnivore, an open source save-it-later reader app.

In a blog post, co-founders Jackson Harper and Hongbu Wu said that joining ElevenLabs would give them “an even larger platform to create accessible and engaging experiences for serious readers.”

“ElevenLabs is committed to the developer community and the Omnivore codebase will remain 100% open-source for all users,” Harper and Wu wrote. “This decision ensures that the broader development community can continue to build upon and improve Omnivore’s technology.”

Omnivore users can export their data until November 16, at which the data will be deleted.

Harper and Wu launched Omnivore in 2021 with the goal of building a read-it-later solution for — as they put it — “people who like text.” Wu and Harper previously worked together at Juvo, a credit scoring firm. Harper was head of data engineering.

Omnivore is a fully-featured platform, with functionality like highlighting, PDF and offline support, apps for the web, iOS, and Android, and extensions for every major web browser. Omnivore also offers text-to-speech, powered by ElevenLabs’ voice generation API.

“We came to know ElevenLabs by integrating their ultra-realistic AI voices into Omnivore,” Harper and Wu wrote. “Soon enough, listening to articles and books with ElevenLabs voices became one of our most popular features in Omnivore.”

With the the move to ElevenLabs, Harper and Wu say that they’ll be investing their development efforts in ElevenReader, ElevenLabs’ own reader app. (In fact, they say they’ve already shipped “valuable updates” to ElevenReader.) ElevenReader, which launched earlier this year, lets users upload articles, PDFs, and e-books and listen to them in different languages and voices, including the voices of actors like Judy Garland and James Dean.

One presumes that a few of Omnivore’s capabilities will make their way into ElevenReader in time.

“Our team is joining ElevenLabs to help drive the future of accessible reading and listening with ElevenReader,” Harper and Wu said. “We’re hard at work ensuring an accessible, bright future for readers everywhere.”

ElevenLabs, which became a unicorn earlier this year after raising $80 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, makes most of its money through AI tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations and video dubbing into other languages. It’s being approached by backers about a new funding round that could value the company at around $3 billion, TechCrunch reported this month.

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