$22M paid back to voice creators
ElevenLabs has paid over $22 million to community voice talent through its marketplace, enabling voice actors to license their voices and earn passive income.
Snapshot · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
The Trillion-Dollar Industries AI Is Disrupting: Voice, Law & the End of the Billable Hour
Explore episode
Jul 13, 2026
Where this was said
Celebrity Voice Deals, Deepfake Impersonation & Racing OpenAI and Anthropic
At 21:05 · chapter starts 15:34
Jason poses the uncomfortable question: ElevenLabs uses frontier models but enables its own potential demise by teaching them about voice. Casser is candid but composed. The company's model-agnostic stance (offering Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and open-source options to customers) is actually a strategic moat — customers build orchestration layers on ElevenLabs without being dependent on any single model. On the research side, Casser argues the voice advantage is architectural, not computational: you need fundamentally different model structures and specialized proprietary data — which is why ElevenLabs employs 1,000+ contractors just to label audio [1] — Mati Casser "ElevenLabs has consistently outperformed OpenAI and Anthropic on voice models — text-to-speech, speech-to-text, turn-taking, and music — no…" 25:55 . He describes a planned move toward owning the full interaction layer: not knowledge work or coding, but every layer of communication — text-to-speech, speech-to-text, turn-taking, music. He closes with an audacious goal: passing the voice Turing test in 2025, making AI conversation indistinguishable from a human one.
ElevenLabs Safeguards: Trace, Moderate, Detect
ElevenLabs has built three safeguards against voice abuse: trace every generation, moderate both voice and text inputs to block commercial scams, and provide open tools for anyone to detect whether an audio sample was AI-generated. Responsible development baked into the core product.
ElevenLabs Paid $22M Back to Voice Creators
Voice actors who spend an hour reading copy can now create an ElevenLabs voice, license it across languages, and earn passive income. The platform has paid out over $22M to its community — turning the gig model into a royalty model.
Voice Restoration: Vows She Never Got to Say
A woman who lost her voice before her wedding used ElevenLabs to restore it and speak her vows for the first time. This is also the work of a US Congresswoman who lost her voice to cancer and delivered the first AI-assisted congressional speech.
Darth Vader Lives in Fortnite, Powered by ElevenLabs
Epic Games used ElevenLabs and the James Earl Jones estate to deploy an interactive Darth Vader in Fortnite, letting players converse with the character live. This is the model for extending celebrity IP into real-time interactive experiences across the world.
Darth Vader in Fortnite via ElevenLabs
Epic Games launched an interactive Darth Vader character in Fortnite powered by ElevenLabs, in partnership with the James Earl Jones estate and Disney.
Beating OpenAI and Anthropic at Voice
ElevenLabs has consistently outperformed OpenAI and Anthropic on voice models — text-to-speech, speech-to-text, turn-taking, and music — not through bigger compute, but through specialized architecture and 1,000+ contractors labeling proprietary audio data. Specialization beats scale here.
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