Is Voice AI (Finally) Becoming Popular?

AI-generated voices are getting better fast—and now they're mobile. ElevenLabs, one of the biggest names in AI text-to-speech, just launched its first mobile app. What's interesting isn't just the tech (which is solid), but how empty the space around it is.

For a feature so many creators and tools rely on, there really aren't many mobile-first options. Unlike other AI apps, voice isn't very popular. Will ElevnLabs change that?

For those not familiar, ElevenLabs makes text-to-speech AI models that are hyper realistic and are used to power many apps, including Perplexity's audio summaries and ESPN's AI agents.

With the release of its mobile app, ElevenLabs is now offering their models to regular consumers who need to replace text with voice. I see it as primarily targeting social media, but there are quite a few applications.

Elsewhere, AI audio isn't really getting a lot of love. The niche ElevenLabs entered isn't very competitive, with the only other app I could find that's similar being Speechify, an app that reads the news for you. Not a true competitor. To compound that, OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode in gpt4o hasn't gotten (m)any updates in quite a while.

But the real question is: are people excited for hyper-realistic text-to-speech?

According to Appfigures Intelligence, ElevenLabs saw 350K downloads from the App Store and Google Play. A little more than half from the App Store and the rest from Google Play, which is a good spread for a launch.

But here's something interesting. The US isn't ElevenLabs' biggest market. The crown goes to India, with 22% of the downloads, followed by the US with 18% of the total. That's not exactly what I expected, but it does show the enormous potential TTS has to enable cross-language communication.

I checked to see if ElevenLabs is running Apple Ads campaigns, and it is, but not well. The company seems to be running aimless discovery campaigns without Custom Product Pages (which we can now see). I hope they find a better strategy soon.

Is There a Market for Voice?

The lack of competition makes it hard to gauge just how much of a market there is for voice, but looking at the one similar app - speechify, a news reader - answers my question relatively quickly with a yes.

The app, which was released in 2017, saw 670K new downloads in May and earned $2.5M of net revenue (after store fees) from the App Store and Google Play. That's a decent opportunity, and while not in direct competition, there's nothing stopping ElevenLabs to get into that market too.

When OpenAI got into voice, I thought it'd take off and we'd see voice in more apps, but that hasn't evolved as fast as I expected. I don't think this app will be the nudge voice needs, but I think it could become popular if ElevenLabs can find a way to get to the mass market.