Some AI voice "donors" receive up to USD 10,000 per month

ElevenLabs, the artificial voice platform backed by Stripe, has grown its library from 11 to over 5,000 voices in less than two years and has become a global marketplace that has already paid out over USD 5 million to authors. The Head of Growth, Luke Harries, explained how the company managed to scale while remaining compact and focused on its AI product.

It is stated in the ElevenLabs blog.

How did the company manage to reach the global level?

Initially, ElevenLabs offered only eleven pre-configured voices, but it quickly became clear that a few presets were not enough for a global audience. The solution was to create the full-fledged marketplace, where clones of real voices with different accents, languages, and dialects appeared alongside synthetic models. Only one engineer set up Stripe Billing, which made it possible to instantly launch subscriptions and later flexible billing for use.

Today, the self-service platform serves hundreds of thousands of users, including Perplexity, Time Magazine, and Bertelsmann. The catalogue already includes more than two thousand voices, ranging from soft American whispers to distinct Irish intonations suitable for games or audiobooks.

Stripe Connect handles KYC, fraud protection, and international payouts, so the voice actors retain control of their own recordings and receive regular royalties, some earning more than USD 10,000 in monthly passive income. All payment transactions are still handled by a single part-time engineer, a task that would have required a separate team to handle currencies, taxes, and compliance without Stripe.

In a field where AI develops instantly, ElevenLabs compares its work to a race: while engineering and production try to keep up, the research team periodically turns on the "nitro" in the form of new models. That's why the company chooses tools that are not only scalable but also easy to adapt. Stripe makes it possible to quickly launch, test, and improve solutions, which is why ElevenLabs has been included in Stripe's annual list, and both companies are growing in tandem.

As a reminder, during the debut Code with Claude conference for developers in San Francisco, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated that AI invents facts in its answers ("hallucinates") even less often than humans. He emphasized that such behavior is not a serious obstacle to the creation of AGI — the universal intelligence capable of thinking at or above the level of humans.

We also wrote that the researchers from Oxford and the Allen Institute for AI concluded that ChatGPT models learn language not through rules but through examples from memory. In the experiment, the researchers analysed how humans and LLM GPT-J form nouns from fictional adjectives with the suffixes -ness and -ity, and found similar approaches to the choice.