ElevenLabs has launched a new generation of artificial intelligence voice generation models, Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, with significant improvements that focus on making artificial voices more natural and expressive, and understanding the way text is delivered, not just pronouncing its words.
The two new models come as part of the company's efforts to bring conversations generated by artificial intelligence closer to human performance, by understanding context, tone, human rhythm, and feelings, in addition to expanding and supporting languages and dialects.
“Eleven 4” represents the company’s new main model, and it was designed to deal with the text as an integrated audio performance, as it can take into account the context of the conversation, and change the tone, rhythm, and pronunciation according to the content of the text.
This is especially evident in dialogues that include more than one speaker, as the model is able to preserve the personality of each voice, and take the context of the dialogue precisely into account, instead of reading each sentence separately. The company also improved the model's ability to maintain consistent audio in long-form content, which is important when producing audiobooks, podcasts, and clips that include long texts.
In the new generation, Eleven Labs has expanded support to include more than 90 languages, while improving the ability to preserve the identity of the voice and the way it performs when using different languages. Improvement is also evident when using the Arabic language and local dialects.
One of the most notable additions in the new generation is the ability to enter “performance instructions” within the text itself, allowing the user to specify the way he wants the sentence to be said. It is possible, for example, to direct the voice to whisper, laugh, or speak enthusiastically or sadly, and add pauses, reactions, and sound effects in specific places in the text.
Eleven Labs has also developed voice cloning technologies. The “Instant Voice Cloning” feature allows the creation of a copy of the user’s voice based on a short recording that may only be about 10 seconds long.
As for “Eleven 4 Turbo,” it focuses on applications that require a quick voice response, such as assistants, voice agents, and customer services that rely on artificial intelligence. The company says that the model is capable of generating sound at a speed of about 100 milliseconds.
On the other hand, SpaceX's giant Starship rocket reached orbit for the first time yesterday (Monday), and deployed the new Starlink satellites, achieving a major achievement despite the engine failure at an early stage of the mission, and the decision to shorten its duration by seven hours.
The mission was scheduled to last 10 hours, but was reduced to just three hours after an engine problem. The launch from Texas was the fourteenth flight of the missile since 2023, as Elon Musk's company plans to begin regular use of the missile later this year.
The 40-story-high unmanned vehicle took off from the launch pad of SpaceX's Starbase facility on the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville.
Upon reaching space, one of Starship's three main engines stopped ahead of schedule, a development that prompted SpaceX spokesman Dan Huett to announce during the mission's live broadcast that the vehicle would not be able to reach orbit, as he said: "The team made the decision not to seek to reach orbit."
Once in orbit, Starship launched 26 Starlink next-generation satellites one by one to an altitude of approximately 269 kilometers, marking the first in-orbit deployment by the rocket. “All 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites have been deployed and are operating normally,” Musk wrote on “X.”
