Anyone who listens to audiobooks on a regular basis knows that a good voice artist can make the difference between loving or hating a book Eleven Labs hopes to bring back iconic voices from the past to create a whole new experience

Eleven Labs' platform, a leader in the world of artificial intelligence sound, allows you to easily clone your own voice from a minute or two of audio The cloned voice can then be used in apps or to read bedtime stories to children when you are not around

Last week, the company launched its Reader app for the iPhone, which allows users to have any of several licensed synthetic voices read out loud from websites to full novels The voice is natural, engaging, and almost indistinguishable from a human voice

The first iconic voices include Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier According to Eleven Labs, all voice actor clones were created in cooperation with the actors' estates and are fully licensed for use in the Reader app

ElevenLabs Reader is an impressive iPhone app that allows you to listen to anything you like using a library of thousands of voices Give it a link to a story, a school report, or even an e-book, and it will read it out loud to you, even if your phone is locked

Currently, only the iPhone version is available in the US and UK, but Eleven Labs says that an Android version is in development and will soon be available in more countries

Upon opening the app, users are presented with a list of recent stories and can choose to read text, links, or files In addition, the voice tab at the bottom offers a library of original, synthesized, cloned, and now iconic voices to choose from

There are narrators ideal for e-books, a wide range of accents, and calm voices for meditation and yoga readings There are also radio host-type voices available if you want to recreate the sound of a podcast

Eleven Labs has contracts with the estates of some of history's most iconic actors, including Judy Garland and Laurence Olivier

The cloned voice is amazingly accurate and can be used anywhere in the application I had Olivier read "1984," which gave a whole new dimension to George Orwell's classic

"It's exciting to have my mother's voice available to the countless millions of people who love her With the spectacular new technology offered by Eleven Labs, we believe that our family will bring new fans to my mother and be exciting for those who already cherish the incomparable legacy she gave and continues to give to the world," said Judy Garland, daughter and Liza Minnelli, president of the Garland Estate,

It is unclear whether we will see more singing in the future, but the answer is likely yes, as Eleven Labs has stated that it hopes to "bring more great talent to this platform in the near future" Dustin Blank, Eleven Labs' head of partnerships, says: "Adding them to our list of narrators represents a major step forward in our mission to make content accessible in any language and voice"