Spotify Partners with ElevenLabs to Add AI-Narrated Audiobooks to the Platform

Spotify, the leading audio streaming platform, has announced a new partnership with ElevenLabs to introduce more AI-generated audiobooks onto its service. On Thursday, the company revealed it will begin accepting audiobooks recorded using ElevenLabs' AI voice technology, highlighting the growing potential of digital voice narration in the audiobook industry.

In the past, AI-produced audiobooks were already allowed on Spotify, albeit with certain restrictions. Findaway Voices, Spotify's audiobook distribution platform, only accepted digitally recorded audiobooks from "select partners" and required each recording to be reviewed before release. This collaboration with ElevenLabs, one of the prominent AI voice providers in the market, could lead to a significant increase in the number of synthesized-voice audiobooks available on Spotify.

Authors can use ElevenLabs to narrate their audiobooks in 29 languages, with various synthetic voices to choose from. The free version of the software offers just 10 minutes of text-to-speech conversion per month. While there are premium options that lift this limitation, users must subscribe to at least the Pro plan, which costs $99 per month, to generate approximately 500 minutes of narration—roughly equivalent to the length of an average audiobook.

Although Spotify emphasizes its belief in the power of human narration, the company acknowledges that digital voices can make audiobook production more cost-effective for niche authors and facilitate the creation of overlooked backlist titles. Spotify stated that all AI-narrated audiobooks will be clearly labeled in their metadata and described in the book summary as "narrated by digital voice."