The team behind the open source read-it-later app Omnivore has been hired by generative AI company ElevenLabs.
In a blog post, Omnivore co-founders Jackson Harper and Hongbo Wu said that joining ElevenLabs would give them "an even larger platform to create accessible and engaging experiences for serious readers."

"ElevenLabs is committed to the developer community and the Omnivore codebase will remain 100% open-source for all users," Harper and Wu wrote. "This decision ensures that the broader development community can continue to build upon and improve Omnivore's technology."

Users of Omnivore can download their data till November 16 after which data will be deleted.

Harper and Wu launched Omnivore in 2021 with the goal of building a read-it-later solution for — as they describe it — "people who like text." Wu and Harper previously worked together at Juvo, a credit scoring firm, where Harper was head of data engineering.

Omnivore is a full-featured platform that includes features like highlight, PDF and offline support, web, iOS, and Android apps as well as extensions for the major web browsers. On top of all this, Omnivore has added text-to-speech functionality powered by ElevenLabs' voice generation API.

"We became aware of ElevenLabs when we integrated their ultra-realistic AI voices into Omnivore," Harper and Wu wrote. "Listening to articles and books with ElevenLabs voices quickly became one of our most popular features in Omnivore."

With the move to ElevenLabs, Harper and Wu say they will be investing their development efforts in ElevenReader, the reader app of ElevenLabs. In fact, they say they have already shipped "valuable updates" to ElevenReader. ElevenReader, which was launched earlier this year, lets users upload articles, PDFs, and e-books and listen to them in different languages and voices, including the voices of actors like Judy Garland and James Dean.

One assumes that some of Omnivore's capabilities will find their way into ElevenReader in due course.

"Our team is joining ElevenLabs to help drive the future of accessible reading and listening with ElevenReader," Harper and Wu said. "We're hard at work ensuring an accessible, bright future for readers everywhere.".

Most of ElevenLabs' money - which made it a unicorn this year after raising $80 million from investors that included Andreessen Horowitz - comes from its AI-based tools to generate synthetic voices for audiobook narrations and video dubbing in other languages. According to a report by TechCrunch this month, it has already been approached by several backers about a new funding round, which could place it at around $3 billion.