Acclaimed independent publisher Lukeman Literary generates audiobooks in minutes in multiple languages

Lukeman Literary, known for decades as an acclaimed literary agency, also functions as an independent publisher, and in this capacity, they produce many audiobooks each year in multiple languages. They have represented a broad range of authors, journalists, politicians and celebrities, among them Nobel Peace Prize or Pulitzer Prize winners. For instancem The Age of Deception by Mohamed Elbaradei or Sam: The Boy Behind the Mask by Tom Hallman have become best sellers. But audiobook production is a large undertaking that involves logistics, production and lots of patience.

In a pioneering move, Lukeman partnered with ElevenLabs to simplify and speed up audiobook production across the world. ElevenLab’s groundbreaking technology reduces production timelines from weeks to minutes in a seamless workflow.

As part of this partnership, Lukeman Literary was given early access to ElevenLabs’ “Projects” product which was designed to help produce audiobooks in a simple and efficient way. During that time, Lukeman’s team was able to provide early feedback that shaped our product.

It used to take Lukeman’s team weeks to produce a single audiobook because it required them to find the right voiceover artist, book a recording studio, record and manage the post-production. Now, the entire process takes a few hours from Lukeman Literary’s team.

Voice technology offers clear benefits to Lukeman Literary and the overall publishing industry:

• Product optimised for audiobook production: A unique product that is able to ingest epub, pdf or word files and automatically splits the content into chapters. Publishers are then able to select the voice and render all content at once. QA can also be done directly from within the product.
• Multilingual content generation: ElevenLabs’ multilingual voice model automatically detects the language and generates high-quality content. Additionally, if the audiobook contains words in a different language, the AI voices will automatically pronounce the words in the correct language.
• Same voice in multiple languages: AI voices produced by ElevenLabs are able to speak all languages supported natively. Lukeman can use the same voice across all languages they are publishing.
• Export: An entire audiobook can be exported in chapters or as a single audio file. All at a click of a button.

Noah Lukeman, President & Founder of Lukeman Literary offered a unique insight:

“For us, quality always comes first. Despite the clear benefits of digital narration, we were not willing to embrace the new technology until a company came along with a narration of groundbreaking quality, one that could match a natural human voice. In 11Labs’ new product, we have found this quality. It is astonishing, and something to be celebrated.”