Pocket FM partners ElevenLabs to help writers create AI audio series with a single click

Writers can navigate to the 'Write' tab in the Pocket FM app and select the 'Series' option to start the process. Once it meets the minimum word count, people can convert their story into an audio series, with an option to choose their preferred voice and background music.

Writers will have an option to choose from around 50 voices, both male and female, suitable for various genres such as romance, drama, fantasy, and horror, Dixit said. The company plans to add more voices in the future.

Dixit said that the feature has been available with select writers for the past few months and the startup has seen 'tremendously good results in terms of engagement'.

Producing 10x more content

Dixit, who also serves as the chief technology officer of Pocket FM, said that AI Audio Series has helped the startup improve its production efficiency by significantly cutting down the production time and cost, he said.

"We can now produce more than 10x of content that we previously could do with similar quality." he said.

Dixit said the firm used to produce about 30 minutes of content for a show on a daily basis. However, with the help of the new AI capabilities and the ElevenLabs partnership, the startup can now produce as much as 2.5-3 hours of content for each show.

This advancement is expected to help Pocket FM expand its content library in newer markets such as Germany and France in a much faster way, Dixit said.

"One of the bottlenecks that we had in these markets was whether we produce content faster. Now with the help of AI, we can launch content in these markets much more faster. The go-to-market time for these markets gets lower than it was before" Dixit said.

"Combining our Voice AI expertise with Pocket FM's approach to audio series promises to take content production to new heights of efficiency and creativity" said ElevenLabs Chief Executive Mati Staniszewski in a statement.

ElevenLabs, which counts Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital among its investors, provides lifelike, realistic, and emotionally rich AI voices across 29 languages for various applications including movie dubbing, conversational AI, and gaming along with medical and accessibility use cases.

It offers these capabilities through a range of proprietary audio AI models optimised for specific purposes, such as long-form and multilingual speech generation, AI dubbing, or latency-sensitive tasks.

Rapid growth

Pocket FM, which offers serialised audio content across genres, raised $103 million in Series D funding in March 2024 at a post-money valuation of $750 million.

The round was led by venture capital firm Lightspeed with participation from private markets investment firm Stepstone Group.With this investment, Pocket FM has raised a total funding of about $196.5 million to date.

The investment came amidst a rapid revenue growth at the Bengaluru-based startup, fueled by microtransactions and its advertising business.

Pocket FM had clocked an annualised revenue rate (ARR) of $150 million across the world as of December 2023, a feat achieved in less than two years and growing by 57 percent on a quarterly basis, co-founder Rohan Nayak told Moneycontrol in March. Of this, more than $100 million comes from the US.

Founded in 2018 by Nayak, Dixit, and Nishanth Srinivas, the service claims to offer over 100,000 hours of content, including over 2,000 exclusive audio series and more than 400,000 episodes.

This content spans across genres such as romance, drama, thriller, fantasy, and science fiction in English and several Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi.