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Buckle up, tech fam! Every week, our dynamic duo “Spark” ✨ & “Trouble”😉 share some seriously cool learning resources we stumbled upon.

Product Labs🔬: Decoding ElevenLabs

What if your favourite podcast could speak to you in any language? Or your brand could have a perfectly tailored AI voice? ElevenLabs is turning these "what ifs" into "what's next."

From creating audiobooks that sound alive to enabling seamless multilingual transitions, Eleven Labs doesn’t just mimic human voices—it empowers them.

What’s in it for you?

ElevenLabs, a cutting-edge voice synthesis and AI speech startup has been redefining the text-to-speech (TTS) landscape. They specialize in building synthetic voices that are indistinguishable from human voices, emphasizing emotional expressiveness, fluency, and tonal precision.

Their journey began with a simple yet profound purpose: build AI to shape the future of communication, ensuring content is understood by everyone, everywhere

Available through both APIs and a web platform, Eleven Labs caters to creators, enterprises, and developers. Their solutions have quickly gained traction for use cases like dynamic storytelling, gaming, accessibility, and interactive learning

What sets ElevenLabs apart is that, unlike conventional TTS systems, their technology can capture the nuances of emotion, context, and accent.

Now to jump right into the deep end of ElevenLab’s features.

• Text to Speech: The OG feature, paste any text and select the voice to convert it to audio

• Voice Changer: This is our favourite feature, you can have so much fun with it. Upload or record an audio and change it to any voice of your choice.

Here is how Amitabh Bachchan’s dialogue (from the movie “Mohabbatein) sounds as an Indian woman [PS: it did take us a few tries to get an audio with female voice end to end, it kept glitching into male voice for a few seconds inbetween]

• Sound Effects: Select from the vast library or provide a prompt to generate any sound effect you want from bathroom shower to meteor shower.

• Agents: Welcome to the future of Customer Service Agents. This is ElevenLabs’ latest feature, where you can create a conversational AI agent from scratch as you. You can also upload your knowledge base to it, though one drawback is the limitation on the size of the knowledge base.

There are a few more features available only on the paid plans:

• Voiceover Studio: This tool creates high-quality, human-like voiceovers using AI. It's versatile for use cases like audiobooks, e-learning, and marketing. Users can select voices, adjust parameters like emotion, and generate tailored voiceovers efficiently.

• Dubbing Studio: This feature facilitates multilingual video localization. It combines automatic transcription, translation, and voice synthesis across 29 languages, preserving each speaker’s unique vocal characteristics while allowing manual adjustments for timing, style, and content

• Audio Native: Aimed at publishers, Audio Native enables the automatic conversion of text content into embeddable audio narrations. This feature improves accessibility and engagement for blogs, newsletters, and news websites, offering customizable playback options

• Voice Isolator: This feature isolates specific voices from an audio track, useful for refining dubbing, voice cloning, or enhancing content where multiple speakers are present. It ensures clarity while maintaining audio integrity

• AI Speech Classifier: A free tool that identifies whether a given audio clip was generated by Eleven Labs' technology. It's an essential tool for ensuring transparency and addressing ethical concerns surrounding AI-generated audio.

What's the intrigue?

Eleven Labs has carved out a unique niche by going beyond generic voice synthesis. Their technology enables high-quality, emotional, and contextual voices in over 30 languages. Recently, they announced an advanced multilingual AI model, enabling not only translation but also the replication of subtle accents and emotions, a critical differentiator in global markets.

Their innovative positioning resonates with market trends like accessibility in tech and AI-driven personalization. By addressing creators’ and developers' needs with precision, they’ve set a gold standard in audio innovation.

Stay tuned hopefully for a Spark & Trouble-directed, AI-generated movie with cool sound effects powered by ElevenLabs.

Your Wish, Our Command 🙌

You Asked 🙋‍♀️, We Answered ✔️

Question: How can product managers effectively leverage AI to create impactful products, especially when they may not have a deep technical background? Are there specific tools, workflows, or strategies that help PMs identify the right AI opportunities and work effectively with technical teams?

Answer: AI empowers PMs to make data-driven decisions and scale their efforts, even without deep technical expertise. By focusing on strategy, using powerful tools, and maintaining clear communication with technical teams, PMs can unlock AI’s full potential for creating impactful products.

Use Examples to Define Scope: Start with concrete examples to define your AI product. For instance, if proposing a chatbot for educational support, include examples like, "Help students understand complex physics concepts by breaking them into simpler terms" or "Answer questions about course deadlines and grading policies."

Assess Feasibility with Rapid Testing: You can test the feasibility of an AI feature by using tools such as OpenAI or Anthropic's APIs for large language models (LLMs). By directly prompting these systems, you can validate whether your idea (e.g., sorting emails into departments) is technically viable before involving engineers. This not only accelerates decision-making but also strengthens your collaboration with technical teams​.

Prototype Without Engineering Support: Leverage no-code or low-code platforms like Replit, Vercel V0, and Bolt for building prototypes. These tools are accessible for PMs, enabling faster iterations and user feedback without heavy reliance on developers and also helps communicate your ideas better and provides a starting point for developers.